The Templar Conspiracy

by Paul Christopher

  “Tom’s Hill,” whispered Holliday.

  “What the hell is Tom’s Hill?” Philpot scowled, irritated that the flow of his narrative had been interrupted.

  “When we tossed Tritt’s house in Lyford Cay—”

  “You what?” Philpot stared, owl-eyed.

  “We tossed Tritt’s place at Lyford Cay. . . . I’ll tell you about it some other time. Anyway, I found a CD with a whole lot of information about a place called Tom’s Hill. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but now . . .”

  “Now what?” Philpot asked.

  “According to Tritt’s CD, Tom’s Hill has a population of only a few thousand but almost all of them are employed by a company called the King Fertilizer Corporation. King Fertilizer is the largest manufacturer of ammonium nitrate in the United States.”

  “Dear God,” said Philpot, looking horrified.

  “What’s so bad about that?” Peggy asked. “What does fertilizer have to do with any of this?”

  “Because ammonium nitrate is the basic ingredient for ANFO,” said Pesek. “The explosive that was used in your Oklahoma City bombings.” The dapper-looking assassin shook his head sadly. “You Americans really are crazy. The sale of such fertilizer has been regulated in Europe for years, but still anyone in your country can buy it by the ton, no questions asked.” He poked back the sheer curtains and looked down at the street again. “Speaking about crazy Americans, it looks as though we have company.”

  Philpot was instantly alert. “What are they driving?” He drew a Glock 9 from his shoulder holster and jacked a round into the chamber.

  “Lincoln Navigator,” answered Pesek. He drew his own weapon, a Beretta 92, and took a stubby little suppressor out of his suit jacket pocket.

  “Blackhawk,” said Philpot. “Either that or our guys. How many?”

  “Four,” said Pesek. “Three in a group; one trailing.”

  “What are they carrying?”

  “Backpacks.”

  “What kind of ordnance, do you think?”

  “Probably FN P90s. Suppressed. The BIS uses them.”

  “BIS?” Peggy asked.

  “Bezpec̆nostní informac̆ní služba,” said Holliday. “The Czech Secret Police.”

  “How do we do this?” Philpot asked.

  The Czech assassin didn’t hesitate for a second. “We need to contain them. The trailing man will come up the stairs to block any attempt at escape. The other three will take the elevator and come into the room. They’ll have a key card.”

  “How can you be so sure?” Peggy asked.

  “Because you can bribe anyone in Prague, Ms. Blackstock. Hotel clerks come very cheap, young lady, I assure you.” He nodded to Holliday. “You and your cousin into the bathroom. Lie down in the bathtub. Mr. Philpot, you take the stairwell.”

  “And you, Pane Pesek?” Philpot asked.

  Pesek smiled and briefly touched his well-groomed mustache. “I shall be in my own room across the hall.”

  Philpot nodded and left the room.

  “Quickly,” said Pesek. “It will be soon now.”

  Holliday grabbed Peggy by the elbow and they headed for the bathroom. Pesek left the room, locking the door behind him.

  “Didn’t he try to kill you once?” Peggy asked, kneeling down in the old cast-iron tub.

  “More than once actually,” said Holliday, climbing in after her. “Not to mention the fact that I tried to kill him. I thought I had, as a matter of fact.”

  “And you still trust him?”

  “I don’t have to,” said Holliday. “Philpot’s paying for his services.”

  “What does that have to do with it?”

  “Pesek’s a pro. He survives on his reputation. He betrays the people who pay his fee and he never gets another job. He’s blackballed for life and probably winds up getting a hit taken out on him.”

  “Murderers with ethics. What’s next?” Peggy sighed.

  “Shut up and bend down,” said Holliday, crouching lower. “The bad guys will be here any second.”

  There was nothing but the faint clicking sound of the magnetic lock popping to announce their arrival and then a dull rattling sound like fifty ball bearings in a washing machine. Holes appeared in the bathroom door, the medicine chest mirror exploded and then there was silence.

  “Do prdele!” said an angry voice.

  “Do pic̆e!” said another voice.

  There was a brief silence and then the sound of Pesek’s voice. “Dobrý den, Zdvor̆ilí pánové,” said the assassin politely. There was a startled exclamation and then three clicks, like someone slowly winding an old-fashioned alarm clock, followed by three more.

  “What the hell was that?” Peggy whispered, crouched down like a frog in the tub.

  Holliday stood up. He could have been melodramatic and told her it was the sound of death, but he stayed silent.

  “It’s safe,” said Pesek. “You can come out now, Colonel Holliday.”

  Holliday stepped out of the tub and opened the bathroom door. Peggy followed him.

  “Holy crap!” Peggy said.

  There were bleeding bodies all over the floor.

  Pesek stood in the short hallway leading to the front door, unscrewing the suppressor from his weapon.

  “Don’t touch anything,” he said. “And come with me quickly. There are probably more where these came from.” He nodded at the corpses bleeding into the worn carpeting. “If not more of them, the police will arrive eventually. We must get you on your way.”

  “Where are we going?” Holliday asked. “We have no papers, no passports—nothing.”

  “Aix-les-Bains,” said Philpot, stepping into the room and surveying the damage. “I have a friend there.”

  28

  Billy Tritt and a boy named Stephen Barnes, one of the more technically minded of the skinhead, psychopathic members of Maine’s Right Arm, stopped the stolen AT&T Southwest van beside the big junction box on Highway 18, a mile from the Tom’s Hill plant of the King Fertilizer Corporation. Tritt switched off the engine and turned to the young man beside him. Both Tritt and Barnes were wearing official AT&T uniforms and hard hats taken from the bodies of the former occupants of the van.

  “You know what to do, soldier?” Tritt asked firmly.

  “Yessir.” Barnes nodded. “Open the junction box and look for a yellow T1 line cable. Where the yellow cable joins the main bundle I insert a three-way and run a secondary line back to you in the van.”

  “Good,” said Tritt. “Got your tools?”

  “Yessir.” Barnes patted the weighty belt around his waist.

  “The three-way?”

  Barnes nodded and dug into the upper pocket of his slightly bloodstained uniform pocket and found the large, chrome connector piece. He held it up. “Right here, sir,” the young man answered proudly. He hadn’t graduated from Lincoln Technical Institute because of money and some drug problems, but he knew what he was doing. If he’d graduated he could have worked for any cable TV company in the state, although the two years at Wynd-ham Correctional really screwed him when it came to getting jobs.

  “Good. Off you go, then, soldier.”

  Barnes, eager as a 260-pound, muscle-bound puppy, clambered out of the van and set up the traffic cones just like he’d been told, even though there wasn’t a car for miles. The scenery was bleak—endless stretches of wind-swept, dirty snow over stubbled cornfields that went on forever.

  The junction box was a big green thing just off the shoulder. Barnes took a short crowbar out of his tool belt, snapped the lock and got down to work, looking for the T1 line that fed the fertilizer plant’s routing information to the servers at the API Logistics center in Wichita. API was the dedicated contract carrier that shipped King Fertilizer’s product to its various locations.

  It took Barnes fifteen minutes to find the T1 line and another ten to feed a line from the box to the little porthole in the side of the van. Tritt took the cable, crimped on a connector and fit the line
onto his Hewlett-Packard laptop. Within a minute or so he’d made his way onto the server at King Fertilizer and had diverted four container loads of ammonium nitrate prills to the dedicated King Fertilizer International docks in Baltimore.

  A few more keystrokes and he set the proper authorization codes for the drivers he would send for the shipment, routing the fertilizer from Baltimore to Maine via Triskip Carriers, a container barging service that served multiple shippers carrying mixed cargo from Baltimore to New Jersey, New York, Boston and Portland, then connecting onward to Halifax and Montreal.

  With those few actions in the middle of the frozen Kansas hinterland, Tritt had put 270,000 pounds of the primary explosive element for the biggest truck bomb ever made into the system. Within the next seven days it would arrive in Portland. During those seven days the other members of Maine’s Right Arm would collect the 2,700 gallons of diesel fuel necessary to add to the explosive-grade prills in the containers. The resulting explosion, effectively ignited, would be roughly one thousand times greater than the Oklahoma City bombing.

  When Tritt was done, he disconnected the computer and rapped on the side of the truck. The cable snaked out through the little porthole and disappeared. Tritt opened the driver’s-side door of the truck and stepped out into the cold, his breath hanging like fog in the still air. He watched as young Barnes gathered up the extra cable, then closed the door of the junction box. He replaced the combination lock he’d snapped off with the crowbar with an identical one from his jacket pocket.

  “All done,” Barnes said, grinning at Tritt. The assassin looked up at the dull gray sky. It was beginning to snow. Big, wet flakes. Perfect.

  “Good job. Now drop the extra cable onto the ground.”

  “Beg pardon?” Barnes said.

  “Drop it, soldier.”

  “Sure, sir,” the young man said, frowning and obviously confused. He did as he was told, however, dropping the extension cable onto the snowy ground. Tritt unzipped his jacket, took the Mossberg Bullpup shotgun out of its sling and shot Barnes in the head. From the neck up Stephen Barnes vanished, pieces of flesh, brains and skull as small as shining pennies went rising into the air like a cloud of spray, settling invisibly on the snow behind and beyond the rest of the young man’s body.

  The corpse crumpled like a Kleenex. Tritt replaced the shotgun in its sling under his arm and went to the corpse. He took a pair of large biohazard bags out of his pocket and the small hatchet off the dead boy’s tool belt. He neatly hacked off the boy’s hands, putting one into each biohazard bag.

  He sealed the bags, put one in each pocket of his down jacket and then picked up the wound-up length of cable. He used his toe to nudge the corpse into the ditch by the side of the road. Eventually, after a few more nudges, the boy’s body toppled over into the ditch.

  Tritt kicked snow into the ditch until the headless, handless body was roughly covered. With luck the boy’s decomposed and leathery remains wouldn’t be discovered until spring planting time. It would probably be longer than that before the corpse was identified, if ever.

  He gathered up the cones, got back into the truck, switched on the engine and the heater, then tossed the coil of cable and the traffic cones into the back of the vehicle. He headed east, toward Wichita Airport. He’d park the truck in the long-term lot, wipe it down and that would be that.

  His basic kit was in an overnight bag in a locker there. He’d rent something from one of the big agencies, drive a couple of states over and buy a food processor in some anonymous Wal-Mart. He’d grind up poor Steve’s hands and flush the pureed remains down the toilet in an equally anonymous motel at least one state over from where he’d shopped at the Wal-Mart.

  He’d rinse the food processor in a bath of Clorox in a motel one state farther on, and finally he’d donate the food processor to a Goodwill in some big city he was passing through. It was overdoing it, Tritt knew, but better too much than too little, as his old grandma used to say, whether it was for making pies or anything else in life.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” muttered Chief Randy Lockwood of the Winter Falls Police Department. “Why is he coming here?”

  Mayor Dotty Blanchette sighed and leaned back in her chair. “Because Mr. Know-It-All went to the Abbey School and it’s his fortieth graduation reunion.”

  “I don’t think you’re supposed to call the President of the United States that kind of name.”

  “Just stating a fact. And, anyway, he’s the lame-duck President of the United States.”

  Lockwood sighed. “When exactly?”

  “Ten days. Advance team arrives in a week. Apparently it’s the annual grudge game scheduled between Winter Falls High and the Abbey School and he’s been invited to drop the puck. A photo op, I guess. I’m supposed to be his escort since his wife is off in Thailand or somewhere, trying to save twelve-year-old hookers from AIDS or something.”

  “He was hockey, right, not football?” Randy asked. “I barely remember him.”

  “Yeah, he was captain of the Abbey School hockey team. The only reason they made him captain was because his old man bought the hockey rink for the school,” said Dotty. “He got into Andover, but the Abbey had a better hockey team so he spent four years there before he legacy’d his way into Yale. Thought he was God’s gift to women, too, which he was, of course. Handsome as hell and all sorts of charisma. He could smile a girl into bed. Not me, though. Too charming by a long shot.”

  “Women can be so cruel.” Lockwood grinned.

  “Water under the bridge,” she said. “The good old days. Best forgotten.”

  “How’s he getting here?” Randy asked. “When his dad came up in the summers he always took a float plane. The lake is frozen, so that’s out.”

  “In their great wisdom the Secret Service hasn’t seen fit to tell me a goddamn thing at this point,” said Dotty. She leaned forward in her big, old, leather swivel chair and took a long sip from her stainless-steel Starbucks cup. The coffee was obviously cold and old and she winced as she sucked down the bitter brew. “Sometimes I think I’m pickled in caffeine,” she said. “It’s the only thing keeping me alive. Not easy running this town, even in the winter, let alone without presidents tripping over their own feet.”

  “I think it would be a good job,” said Lockwood with a twinkle in his eye. “All those perks—chain of office, getting to ride in one of Mark Horrigan’s Cadillacs at the head of the Trout Parade every year.”

  “Speaking of Horrigan, did you ever find his kid?”

  “Vanished into the clear blue,” said Randy. “Word is his dad sent him down to his mother’s place in Florida.”

  “Going to go after him?”

  “Why rock the boat?” Randy shrugged. “He’ll get into trouble down there soon enough. Let them handle it.” He got up from his seat in front of Mayor Dotty’s desk. City Hall was in the old Municipal Building and through Dotty’s arched windows he could see across the square to the parked cars on Main Street. Time to give out a few parking tickets to swell the town’s treasury. “Besides,” he said, smiling, “I’ve got more important things to think about than Tommy Horrigan. I’ve got to look after the GD President of the United States.”

  29

  The first person to see Aix-les-Bains for what it was worth was probably a Roman centurion on his way into Gaul from Italy to conquer the unruly barbarians. When he mustered out of the army he returned to the pretty lakeside spot, built a pool over the hot springs, called it Aquae Grantianae and a tradition was born.

  Located under the shadow of Mont Revard by the shores of Lake Bourget, the largest body of fresh water in France, the little town of Aix-les-Bains has been soothing the arthritic joints of its wealthy patrons for the last two thousand years. It came into particular favor in the 1880s after a visit from Queen Victoria of England. She decided she liked it so much Her Royal Majesty attempted to buy it from the French government. They graciously declined and then built a casino and a racetrack to further f
leece the charming resort’s guests, renaming the hot springs Royale-les-Bains.

  Special trains arrived from Paris full of high society who came to paddle on the plage. Steamers churned their way across the English Channel, filled with the straw hat- and-tennis set, intent on whiling away the hot summer months in the refreshing Alpine air as wives cheated on husbands, husbands on wives and best friends on each other while Clara Butt sang “The Keys of Heaven” on the gramophone. It was la belle epoque, and as with all epoques, it faded away like an old soldier, the gilt in the ceilings beginning to peel, the marble floors cracking and the pipes carrying the hot springwater making a terrible clanking noise and sounding much like the joints of the patrons it had once serviced. The small and ancient town hidden away in the mountains was virtually forgotten, which was exactly why Mr. Richard Pyx, the document provider, lived there. That and the town’s proximity to his numbered bank accounts less than a hundred miles away in Geneva, Switzerland.

  Peggy Blackstock awoke as the first pink rays of the sun rose over the mountains and craggy hills that marked the edge of the French Alps of the Haute Savoie. She had made her way to the backseat of the Prague rental Mercedes somewhere along the way and Holliday was now sitting in the front with Philpot, who was still behind the wheel.

  “Good morning,” the chubby man said brightly as she sat up, blinking and looking around. “Almost there.”

  “Where is there?” Peggy yawned. She stared out the window. They were on a high mountain road. To the left banks of heavy forest tilted upward; below, in the reaching light she could see the geometric outlines of a town nestled at the far end of a long, wide lake.