The Templar Cross t-2

by Paul Christopher

  "We were never formally introduced," said Rafi.

  "Father Damaso was very pleased to discover that you had come to Rome. He tells me the two of you have some unfinished business."

  "We're not here for a pissing contest," said Holliday.

  "I'm not entirely sure what we're here for," said the priest.

  A young waiter in a long apron appeared with a dish of olives and a basket of bread. He put them both down on the table, then brought a large pepper grinder out of one of the apron's deep pockets and a scratch pad from another. He put the pepper grinder on the table, then asked for their order in very broken English. The priest immediately questioned the waiter in Italian and the young man responded with a list of things that sounded as though they could be dinner entrees.

  The priest turned back to Holliday.

  "Molise is a very poor region of Italy but it is known for a dish that is a specialty here: zuppa di pesce alla Termolese, a sort of Italian bouillabaisse. They also carry a rather good vintage of a local white wine, Falanghina Del Molise 2005, very nice with the fish."

  "We didn't come here to eat," said Holliday.

  "An Italian never needs an excuse to eat," answered the priest. "There is no reason why we cannot share a meal." His smile flashed momentarily. "On me, of course," he said. Father Thomas turned away briefly and spoke to the waiter. The young man scribbled on his notepad, repeated the order back to the priest and then scurried away, heading toward the rear of the restaurant.

  "Can we get down to business now?" Holliday asked, the irritation clear in his voice.

  "I wasn't aware that we had any business," said Father Thomas. He spent a few seconds preparing himself a little side plate of olive oil and balsamic vinegar from the little vinaigrette decanters on the table, then tore a piece of bread in half and wiped it through the mixture. He popped the chunk of bread into his mouth and followed it up with an olive.

  "You have my cousin Peggy. We want her back."

  "Ah, yes," the priest said and nodded. "Dr. Wanounou's paramour." He smiled at Rafi, then dipped another piece of bread into the oil-and-vinegar mixture.

  "We're offering the gold for her return," said Holliday. "You get Rauff's bullion in exchange."

  "How do I know you have the gold?" Father Thomas asked.

  "I never said we had it. I said we knew where it was."

  "How do you know we haven't found it already?"

  "It wasn't in the camp. If you'd managed to take Alhazred alive after your little raid he would have told you by now and you wouldn't be sitting here bargaining with us."

  "The Church has plenty of money, Colonel Holliday. Why should we need your so-called bullion?"

  "Number one, I'm not so sure that the Church has as much money as you'd have us think; you're much the same as General Motors, Ford and Chrysler; you're trying to sell an inferior product and people just aren't buying anymore. Number two, even if the Church has money, I'm willing to bet your budget isn't what it once was. And number three, if any word of the Church's involvement with Rauff and that gold became public it would put the last nail in the coffin of your continued existence. You have to get that gold back before it starts leaking onto the open market. That's why you had Pesek and Kay kill Valador in Cannes; he was skimming. You need to get those bars re-smelted and erase any connection between Rauff and the Church. A German Pope who was in the Hitler Youth is bad enough; the Church in bed with the man who invented the modern gas chamber would be a disaster."

  "As you suggest, Colonel Holliday, gold is probably the easiest currency to launder. Yesterday's gold incisor is tomorrow's wedding band. But the question is irrelevant; Standartenfuhrer Rauff made an agreement with us in 1944. Through our organization he received aid and documentation allowing for his escape from prosecution. In return he promised us his hoard of Tunisian gold. We kept our part of the bargain and even posthumously he will keep his. The gold is ours by right."

  "Release Peggy and you'll have it," said Holliday.

  There was a pause in the conversation as the waiter reappeared with the wine, followed by a man in a chef's high hat carrying two large flattish bowls piled high with clams, mussels and seafood in an aromatic broth. The waiter set down the wine, the man in the chef's hat put down the bowls and a few seconds later a plump, pleasant-looking woman in a flowered dress appeared carrying two more bowls of the zuppa di pesce and then withdrew with a beaming Buon appetito!

  The priest lifted his fork, picked out a mussel on top of the pile in his bowl and surgically removed the meat from its dark shell. He savored the morsel, then washed it down with a little wine. Nobody else at the table had touched either food or drink. Father Thomas gave a little sigh and put down his glass.

  "I think perhaps you should disabuse yourself of any thought that our meeting is in any way a negotiation, Colonel Holliday. You are out-gunned, outnumbered and outmaneuvered. You have nothing to bargain with. Should you decide not to tell me about the whereabouts of the gold I shall have Father Damaso here defile your cousin in ways you could not imagine in a thousand years. Should you continue to guard the secret of the bullion's whereabouts Father Damaso will execute Miss Blackstock, slowly and painfully. And he will enjoy himself doing it, Colonel.

  "Father Damaso, I might add, has been trained by some of Augusto Pinochet of Chile's most experienced torturers, and they of course were trained by the man of the hour, Standartenfuhrer Rauff. From what Father Damaso leads me to understand, Herr Rauff's methods would even have impressed the tribunals of the Spanish Inquisition."

  Father Thomas picked up another clam between his fingers, sucking the muscle wetly out of the shell and into his mouth. He chewed and swallowed.

  "So there you have it, Colonel Holliday. Not a negotiation, an ultimatum." The priest took a small square card and a Mont Blanc fountain pen from the inside pocket of his suit jacket. He unscrewed the cap of the pen and wrote briefly on the card, then handed the little square of cardboard across the table to Holliday. It was a phone number.

  "Call me," said Father Thomas. "You have twenty-four hours to make up your mind." He glanced meaningfully toward the bald man, who still had neither moved nor said a word. "After that things will no longer be within my control." The priest smiled pleasantly. "Now eat up before your food gets cold."

  "I think I'm going to puke," said Rafi. He pushed back his chair, the legs scraping noisily on the tile floor. He stood, glared down at the bald priest Damaso, who had begun to eat his zuppe. "I'll kill you if you so much as touch her."

  Damaso looked up from his bowl, a little juice dripping down to his sharp chin. His lips barely moved when he spoke.

  "You could try, Jew boy," he said quietly.

  Rafi stormed out of the restaurant.

  "Your friend appears to have lost his appetite," said Father Thomas. "Perhaps your Egyptian colleague watching us from across the street would like to finish Dr. Wanounou's meal; he must be hungry by now." He pointed his fork toward Rafi's place at the table and the steaming bowl of aromatic seafood soup. "It would be a shame to see it go to waste."

  Holliday stood up.

  "I'm not hungry, either," he said.

  "As you wish, Colonel Holliday, but you're missing a culinary treat." He took a sip of wine. "Twenty-four hours."

  Holliday followed Rafi out of Piacere Molise.

  The priest watched him go, then turned his attention back to the food before him.

  Half an hour later Rafi sat fuming in one of the armchairs in the sitting room of their suite at the Alimandi Hotel. On the other side of the small elegant room Holliday sat waiting by the telephone. Through the open doors leading out to the balcony came the buzzing sound of the waspish little Vespa scooters whizzing through the traffic on the Viale Vaticano.

  "Did it work?" Rafi said.

  "Hold your horses," said Holliday. "We'll know in a few minutes."

  "We should have heard by now. And why hasn't Tidyman called?"

  "Relax," said Holliday.
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  "How am I supposed to relax? That bastard was talking about torturing Peggy," said Rafi hotly. "If this plan of yours doesn't work, we're screwed."

  The phone rang. Rafi jumped. Holliday picked up the receiver and listened.

  "Thank you," said Holliday. "Send him up." He hung up the phone and turned back to Rafi. "He's here."

  "It's about time."

  Holliday rose and went to the door of the suite. A few moments later there was a knock. Holliday opened the door. It was the waiter from Piacere Molise, minus the long apron and carrying a paper bag in his hand. He was grinning broadly. Holliday led the young man into the room.

  "You two haven't been introduced. Rafi, this is an old student of mine, Lieutenant Vince Caruso, class of '06. I gave him a C minus, if I remember correctly. He works for the military attache here." Caruso sat down on the couch and put the paper bag on the coffee table.

  "Pleased to meet you," said Rafi.

  The young lieutenant opened up the bag and took out the tall pepper grinder he'd left on their table in the restaurant. He unscrewed the bottom of the grinder and eased out a flat FM microphone with a dangling wire. He reached into the bag and put something that looked like a small cassette player on the table alongside the little microphone.

  "My boss would have a fit if he knew I'd borrowed his stuff," said Caruso.

  "How'd we do?" Holliday said.

  "They kept talking for half an hour after you guys left," said Caruso happily. "All sorts of good stuff. Kind of thing that the media eats up. These are serious bad guys." The young man shook his head. "Talk about wolves in sheep's clothing."

  "The most dangerous kind," said Rafi.

  "Any trouble with the owners of the restaurant?" Holliday asked.

  "Are you kidding?" Caruso laughed. "He calls those people corvos nero, black crows. He was only too happy to help his amici Americano."

  "Then we've got them," said Holliday, clapping his hands together with satisfaction.

  "But we still don't have Peggy," said Rafi.

  The phone rang on the other side of the room. Holliday got up and answered it. He listened for a few moments, then hung up.

  "That was Emil," said Holliday, grinning from ear to ear, his eyes sparkling happily. "The GPS tracker you gave us worked perfectly, Vince. We nailed it."

  "Where is she?" Rafi said.

  "A place called Lido del Faro-Lighthouse Beach, less than twenty miles from here at the mouth of the River Tiber. They've got her stashed in some kind of old fishing shack there."

  25

  "I'm surprised that it worked at all," confessed Holliday, sitting in the roof garden of the Hotel Alimandi and eating breakfast. It was only nine thirty but the day was already hot, the summer sun shining down from a cloudless sky. Across the Viale Vaticano Holliday could see the top of the Sistine Chapel and the ranks of tiled rooftops within the Holy City.

  "I'm not," said Emil Tidyman, eating a very Western meal of sausages and scrambled eggs. "Perhaps you have to live in a religious place like Egypt to understand it. A place that has bred fundamentalist thought for a thousand years."

  "I was born and raised in Israel," snorted Rafi. "What would you call that?"

  "Israel is a democracy; church and state are separate. In Egypt the ulamas, the religious leaders, still control the heart and soul of the nation. The only thing the average Jew does not do is eat these," said Tidyman, waving a chunk of sausage on the end of his fork. "I'm talking about how these people think."

  He ate the sausage, then reached out and poured himself another cup of coffee from the shiny silver pot in the middle of the starched linen tablecloth. He nodded toward the Vatican rooftops. "Jews have turned independent thought into a virtue. To Catholics and Muslims it is virtually a sin. Catholic fundamentalists and Muslim fundamentalists are very much alike in that they share a common fundamental belief: there is no individual, there is only Faith with a capital F. Everything is the will of God or the will of Allah and that's all there is to it. The ordinary man is powerless. Free will is for the Gods alone, interpreted by various popes and mullahs. It is their strength as well as their fatal flaw."

  "History is full of that," agreed Holliday. "They took interpreting prophecy very seriously in the old days. The Macedonian kings had less power than the Oracle at Delphi. Troy fell because Cassandra's prophecy went unheeded. Caesar died because he failed to heed his soothsayers about the Ides of March."

  "I still don't see what all of this has to do with our killer priests," said Rafi.

  "I was just getting to that," said Tidyman seriously, putting a generous layer of honey on a thick slice of toast. "According to their dogma, Man cannot change history-history can only change Man. They have the absolute arrogance of infallibility; they are the Church, after all; how could a few outsiders presume to overpower them? It never occurred to Father Thomas or whatever he calls himself that we would act offensively against him." The Egyptian shrugged. "As I said before-we must take advantage of their vulnerabilities." He bit off a piece of toast and smiled.

  "Then again," said Rafi sourly, "for all your philosophy, maybe we just got lucky."

  "That, too," said Tidyman, washing his toast down with a mouthful of coffee.

  "According to their schedule," said Holliday, "we've got about twelve hours left."

  "Then you should make the call," responded Tidyman. "I'll go down to the desk and get the package your friend from the embassy left for us earlier."

  Back in their suite Holliday called the telephone number written on the card the priest had given him. It was answered promptly on the first ring.

  "Colonel," said Father Thomas. "You've come to a decision?"

  "I've changed the rules," answered Holliday.

  "Really," said the priest. He didn't sound impressed.

  "Listen."

  Holliday held the speaker of the digital recorder Vince Caruso had used the night before. He pressed the On switch.

  "Yesterday's gold incisor is tomorrow's wedding band," said Father Thomas on the recorder. Holliday switched off the little machine.

  "Remember that?" Holliday said.

  There was a long silence. Finally the priest spoke. His voice was strained.

  "I told you that you were resourceful, Colonel Holliday, but clearly I didn't know just how resourceful you really were. Someone else was obviously involved." He paused and thought for a moment. "The waiter?"

  "You told me I had nothing to bargain with," answered Holliday, ignoring the priest's question. "Now I do."

  "We could simply deny it," said Father Thomas. "A fake, a fabrication created by our enemies. No one would believe you."

  "Not everyone, but a few would believe it. There'd be an investigation. It's like Watergate, Father Thomas. It's not the crime that gets you-it's the cover-up."

  There was another long silence.

  "What are you suggesting?" Father Thomas said finally.

  "Just what I offered last night, except now you get a bonus. The gold and the tape. A twofer."

  "How will I know you didn't make copies?" queried the priest.

  "You don't," said Holliday. "But I'm not a fool. I'll keep my side of the bargain. We're well aware of your organization's long arm."

  "You'd do well to remember it," warned Father Thomas.

  "A trade and a truce," offered Holliday.

  "That would require an exchange."

  "I'll call you," said Holliday. He hung up the phone.

  "Will he actually do it?" Rafi asked.

  "Not in a million years," said Holliday.

  Tidyman reappeared a few minutes later carrying a heavy-looking rectangular box wrapped in brown paper. He sat down on the couch, took a penknife from his pocket and opened the box with a few deft slices through the paper. Inside the plain covering was a medium-sized blue Tupperware container, and inside the plastic box, packed in foam peanuts, were three automatic pistols, three boxes of ammunition in plastic strip-clips, a GPS unit and five black Nokia
cell phones.

  "Will the lieutenant get in trouble if any of this surfaces?" Tidyman asked.

  "We're supposed to toss the weapons and the phones when we're done-they're clean, untraceable. The GPS unit he wants back if possible," replied Holliday.

  "The boat?" Tidyman asked.

  "Leaves the dock at the Marconi Bridge at noon," said Holliday. "It gets to Ostia Antica at one thirty." He glanced at his watch. "We've got an hour and a half to set up." He looked across to Tidyman. "You know what to do?"

  "There is a big potted plant by the doorway next to the pizzeria with the green awning at Santamaura Street and Via Candia," recited the Egyptian. "I plant the phone there, call you when I'm done and then get to the bridge in time to catch the boat."

  "Rafi?"

  "When you call me I get to the Castro Pretorio stop on the Metro and then I call the priest. I make sure he hears the announcer on the PA system give the name of the stop."

  "Then what?" quizzed Holliday.

  "I get on the subway and go in the opposite direction to the Marconi stop. Then I get myself to the bridge and the boat." The Israeli paused. "If any of us are being followed we'll know by then. We hope."

  "Good," said Holliday. He could almost feel the blood rushing through his veins. "That's it. Are we ready?"

  "Ready," said Tidyman.

  "Ready," said Rafi.

  Holliday smiled to himself, a little surprised at the depth of his emotions.

  He hadn't felt this alive in years. This was who he was.

  "Let's saddle up then," he said.

  "Not 'lock and load'?" Rafi grinned.

  "Different generation," said Holliday. "I'm from the John Wayne era, but yeah, that too."

  For Holliday it was a simple exercise in applied tactics: when faced with a superior numerical force the primary objective was to distract the enemy and split his forces; divide and conquer. The Normandy invasion was a classic example: make Rommel's forces believe that the invasion was coming at Pas de Calais, the obvious choice, then attack somewhere else, in that case the beaches at Normandy.

  For Rafi and Tidyman it was a bit too obvious, like a high school football play: fake left, go right. Distract the priest and his thugs and send them on a wild-goose chase to the north on the subway line, but attack them with a much smaller force to the south, into the heart of enemy territory.