Templar Cross

by Paul Christopher

  “And what does it have to do with Peggy’s disappearance?” Rafi asked angrily. “We’re sitting here talking about theological voodoo and she’s in danger. What possible connection is there?”

  “I suggest that the shared motive is a sense of imminent danger. The Vatican obviously sees Colonel Holliday as a threat. I would say the same holds true for Miss Blackstock. Either she alone or the expedition as a whole discovered something that the Brotherhood of Isis perceives to be a threat as well. The connection is quite clear. Brasseur must have triggered La Sapinière’s interest while he was doing his research at the Vatican and whatever he found in the Templar documents in the Secret Archives led to the kidnapping of the group in the desert.”

  “That’s insane,” argued Rafi. “It’s oil and water. Islamic terrorists and the Vatican?”

  “Oil and water indeed,” said Ducos calmly. He paused for a moment, took a kitchen match from the pocket of his ancient suit jacket and scratched it alight on one yellowed thumbnail. He relit his pipe, sucking noisily and blowing clouds of smoke into the air, swirling into the broad sunbeams coming through the shutters. “Oil and water indeed,” he repeated. “And since oil and water do not usually mix, Doctor, as a scientist I would suggest that you search for an emulsifier, some common cause.”

  “Could it be something as simple as territory?” Holliday asked. “The expedition crossed into the Brotherhood’s turf?” He shrugged. “Maybe they were affronted by a bunch of Catholic priests defiling their sacred land or something.”

  “Possible but unlikely, Colonel. I was born much closer to the nineteenth century than the twenty-first but I have kept up with events, I think. There are few true believers anymore. Terrorist organizations are like political campaigns—they’re always in need of money and volunteers. There are the cynical among us who believe, with good reason, that 9/11 was nothing more than a publicity stunt by bin Laden to raise his stature among his peers. In the nineties all he could be blamed for was a failed assassination attempt and some complicity in the Dar es Salaam and Nairobi embassy bombings. Instead of being the rich, favored son of an Arab sheik he was a nobody and a poor one at that. Just prior to 9/11 his family had cut off his seven-million-dollar-a-year allowance. He needed a fund-raiser. The Brotherhood are no different.”

  “Then Doc is right—it’s really all about money,” Rafi said.

  “The Brotherhood is a small group and it has no real backer,” Ducos said. “With Qaddafi in America’s bed once more they have been cast adrift. The Brotherhood’s territory ranges from Qare on the edge of the Qattara Depression to Jaghbub on the far side of the border.”

  The old man levered himself upright, wincing as he did so, palms flat on the desk. He lumbered over to the filing cabinets, opened one of the drawers and withdrew a buff-colored file. He brought the file to his desk, sat down again with a little sigh and pulled an eight- by-ten photograph out of the folder. He slid it across the desk to Holliday.

  The photograph showed a young man in sunglasses wearing shorts and a black T- shirt that read I Was There: Solar Eclipse 2006-03-29. Directly behind him two turbaned men were talking beside a battered Toyota Land Cruiser. On the right edge of the picture Holliday could see some pale-colored ruins of what might have once been stone huts.

  “This photograph was taken by a Canadian tourist chasing the 2006 eclipse. It was taken at the ruins at the small oasis of Tazirbu in the central Sahara. The two men talking in the background are Sulaiman al-Barouni on the left and Mahmoud Tekbali on the right.” Holliday looked closely. Al-Barouni looked much older than his companion. His face was drawn and deeply lined, skin drawn tightly over his bladelike cheekbones. Tekbali was younger, his face darker, his eyes covered by expensive Serengeti Driver sunglasses.

  “Exactly who are they?” Rafi asked, looking over Holliday’s shoulder.

  “Tekbali is a senior officer in the Brotherhood, second in command to Mustafa Ahmed Ben Halim, the founder and leader of the group.”

  “So what’s the significance of the photograph?” Holliday asked.

  “It is significant because Sulaiman al-Barouni is the chief go-between for a man named Antonio Neri. Neri is the boss of an Italian criminal organization known as La Santa. Neri’s specialty is smuggling women, drugs and valuable artifacts. Contrary to the Great Leader’s press releases concerning the satanic evil of the American drug culture, Libya has long been an alternative location for the Marseilles morphine labs. As well there is always a supply of village women looking for broader horizons, and Libya and Egypt have been doing a thriving business in tomb raiding and artifact smuggling for thousands of years.” The old man lifted his sagging shoulders in a Gallic shrug. “The Vatican. La Santa. The Brotherhood.”

  “Oil and water,” said Rafi.

  “A common cause,” said Holliday.

  “Indeed,” said Ducos, and smiled.

  5

  It was like stepping into a Humphrey Bogart movie; any minute now you expected a sloe-eyed Lauren Bacall to appear with a cigarette in her hand, looking for someone to light her up. The interior of the Bar Maritime in the Vieux Port of Marseilles was all brown wood and thirties- style, down-at-the-heels and I-don’t-give-a-damn décor complete with a sleepy bartender and just as sleepy patrons nodding on their high stools over their pastis and Stella Artois, with hungrier patrons chowing down on escargots or petit quiche or a big bowl of local steamed mussels, the coquillage that formed the mainstay of the bouillabaisse that was the foundation of every menu on the Azure Coast.

  Holliday and Rafi Wanounou were sitting at a small round table at the front window, soaking up the atmosphere. The remains of lunch were still on the table as well as their coffee cups. Seated with them was Louis Japrisot, a captain in the Police Nationale de France, formerly known as the Sûreté. Japrisot was short and stocky with a broad, jowled face, a lot of gray-stubbled five o’clock shadow and a bristling salt-and-pepper Stalin mustache, of the soup strainer variety. He appeared to be in his late fifties.

  He had fierce black eyes, eyebrows like his mustache and a military-style short back and sides crew cut. Somewhere along the line he’d had his nose broken and he had a bull neck. Underneath the wrinkled brown suit the muscles of his arms and shoulders flexed like a boxer’s. Sitting still was something he didn’t do very well. He smoked Gitanes continuously, the harsh cigarettes disappearing into his big butcher’s hands.

  “Been a cop long?” Holliday asked, looking for something to say. Japrisot wasn’t the most voluble person he’d ever met, even though his English was excellent.

  “Thirty-one years. Before that the Prévôtales in Algeria.”

  “Prévôtales? Provost Corp? Military Police?”

  “Yes, Le Légion étrangère, what you call the Foreign Legion.”

  “Bad times,” commented Holliday.

  “Very bad,” said Japrisot. He shrugged. “Better for me than others however,” he murmured.

  “How so?”

  Japrisot’s heavy shoulders lifted again.

  “I wasn’t at Dien Bien Phu.”

  “There is that,” Holliday said and nodded. The Battle of Dien Bien Phu had been the last encounter of the war in Indochina for the French and a ghastly preview of the coming war in Vietnam for the United States. More than a thousand soldiers died during the prolonged battle and several thousand more were taken prisoner, never to be heard from again.

  Japrisot stared out the window and smoked. Across the quay the Vieux Port was a forest of masts. Once the central port of the city, the Vieux Port was now reserved for pleasure craft and the local fishing fleet. On the far side of the narrow harbor a line of pale yellow seventeenth- and eighteenth-century buildings rose in a solid wall. At the far end of the harbor was a narrow plaza where the daily fish market was staged, and rising away from it was la Canebière, a broad triumphant avenue that led up the steep hill the old city was built on, leading to the basilica on the summit. The only thing Holliday remembered about Marseille was
that King Alexander Karageorgevich I of Serbia had been assassinated there in 1934, the first political murder ever caught on film.

  “All I know about Marseille is The French Connection ,” offered Rafi.

  “Popeye-goddamn-bloody-Doyle,” muttered Japrisot, stubbing out his cigarette in a big enameled Cinzano ashtray in the middle of the table. “He put a curse on this place. Connard!”

  “Things aren’t as bad as the movie made out?” Holliday asked.

  “They are actually much worse,” said Japrisot. “Sometimes I think the film made it that way with all the publicity it was given. Still, the tourists come and ask if they can see where the heroin is made. Merde! It gives the place a reputation, yes? Not a good one. We have Disney cruise ships and you hear them talking, Gene Hackman this, Gene Hackman that.”

  “They don’t smuggle drugs here?” Rafi asked.

  “Of course they smuggle drugs here. They smuggle everything here,” answered Japrisot. “Morphine, pornography, girls, Africans, toothpaste, cigarettes. Cigarettes. A great many cigarettes. Le Milieu smuggles anything to make a profit. Last year it was false teeth from the Ukraine.”

  “Le Milieu?” Holliday asked.

  “Marseille’s version of the Mafia, the underworld,” explained Japrisot. “They started off mostly as stevedores, controlling the waterfront in the late forties and early fifties, then moved from there. After the war they got into drugs in a big way.”

  “Is our guy Valador one of this Milieu?” Rafi asked.

  Japrisot let out a snorting laugh, smoke rushing out of his nostrils like an animated bull in a cartoon.

  “Little Felix!?” Japrisot said. “Felix Valador barely knows his mother’s name, let alone anyone in Le Milieu. He’s strictly small-time. Sometimes he brings a few hundred cartons of cigarettes in for the Corsicans, sometimes knockoff Rolexes from a Hong Kong freighter. Connecting with La Santa is a big step up for him, believe me. We got lucky, my friends—of that, I have no doubt.”

  A boat came through the narrow entrance to the Vieux Port. It was an old- fashioned harbor trawler, perhaps forty-two feet long, the high deckhouse set far back toward the stern. Once upon a time she’d been painted blue and white; now she was just dirty, rusty tear tracks running down from her ironwork, dark stains everywhere from bilge runoff, her brightwork dull under a layer of grease. Her license number was painted in large figures on her bow and there was a nameplate on her transom as she passed, heading toward the tent-covered fish market on the plaza at the end of the harbor.

  “That’s her, Valador’s boat, La Fougueux,” said Japrisot. “In English, Tempestuous, I think.”

  “Now what?” Rafi asked.

  “Perhaps we should go for a little stroll,” suggested the French policeman. He lit another cigarette, stood up, flicked ash off his bright yellow tie and stepped out into the sun-dappled afternoon. Rafi followed. Sighing, Holliday dropped three fifty-euro notes on the table to cover their tab and went after them. Japrisot hadn’t shown the slightest sign of paying for his own lunch even though he’d been the one to order wine. Apparently whatever his obligation was to the old lawyer Ducos it didn’t include cash.

  The Rive Nueve, the New Side of the old port, seemed to be wall-to-wall restaurants and bars. There was everything from a Moroccan place called Habib’s to an Irish pub and a German beer garden called Kanter’s. They made their way down the broad quayside, keeping on the shady side, threading their way around café tables full of patrons finishing lunch and enjoying the weather.

  Holliday watched as La Fougueux tied up at the dock, nestled beside the little double-ended, black-hulled ferry that took tourists from one side of the harbor to the other for a few euro. A blond-haired man stepped out onto the foredeck wearing a bright red nylon shell. He looked tall and athletic, somewhere in his thirties. Another man appeared, shorter, heavier and older. Together they started hauling fifty-kilo rope-handled fish boxes up on deck.

  Holliday, Rafi and Japrisot walked across the Rive Nueve and stood looking out over the water, leaning on the beige metal fence that ran around the seawall. Japrisot flicked the butt of one cigarette down into the oily water and lit another. A young woman was sunbathing topless on a sail-boat almost directly below them. The boat was a Contessa 32, named Dirty Girl. The sunbathing woman was much larger than that, at least a 38. Japrisot paid no attention.

  “The one in the red shell is Valador,” he said. “The older man is Kerim Zituni. A Tunisian. Some people say he was Black September once upon a time. Others that he was one of the Tunisian Black Suits—their secret police.”

  “Is that signifigant?” Holliday asked.

  “He’s old enough for it to mean that he probably worked with Walter Rauff,” answered Japrisot.

  “Never heard of him.” Holliday shrugged.

  “I have,” said Rafi, his voice dull. “He murdered my grandparents. He was one of the men who invented the mobile gas trucks the Nazis used in the sub-camps. He was also in charge of the Final Solution in North Africa. He rounded up all the Jews in Morocco and Tunisia and exterminated them. If Rommel had taken Egypt, Rauff’s next step would have been Palestine.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “He died in Chile in 1984. Peacefully, in his sleep,” answered Japrisot. “He was seventy-eight. He was an intelligence advisor to Pinochet.”

  “So we take it this Zituni is not a nice man,” said Holliday dryly.

  “And potentially very dangerous,” Japrisot said and nodded.

  They kept watching the ship as Felix Valador and his Tunisian companion continued to stack fish boxes on the deck. At forty boxes they stopped and Valador began humping the boxes down onto the narrow plaza and loading them into a bright red boxy old Citroën HY van with corrugated sheet metal sides. A sign on the side of the van read Poissonnerie Valador in gold with a phone number beneath. He loaded the first ten boxes through the side door and the rest through the doors at the back of the van.

  “Notice the order,” commented Japrisot, watching as Valador loaded the boxes one at a time.

  “Last ones out of the hold went into the truck first,” said Rafi.

  “Remember that,” said Japrisot.

  “He’s almost done,” said Holliday.

  “Bien,” murmured Japrisot. He flipped yet another cigarette butt into the greasy water, nodded pleasantly to the young lady on the deck of the Dirty Girl and turned away. “Attendez-moi,” he instructed. He climbed into an angle-parked, dark blue Peugeot 607 four-door sedan, probably the most ubiquitous car on the highways of France. This one was almost ten years old and looked like a well-used taxi, which was probably the point.

  Rafi got into the back and Holliday slid in beside Japrisot. He wrinkled his nose. The inside of the car smelled like an ashtray and the windshield was fogged with a slightly yellow film of old nicotine. Japrisot lit another Gitane and switched on the ignition. The car chugged to life. The French cop watched as Valador finished loading the fish boxes into the rattletrap van and then had a brief conversation with Kerim Zituni. Conversation over, Zituni climbed back onto La Fougueux while Valador started up the Citroën and drove off. Japrisot followed the square-nosed little truck. They headed east, staying well behind the van, moving steadily away from the center of town.

  “He’s not going on the Autoroute,” commented Rafi. On their right hand the Mediterranean glowed like an immense blue jewel, bright light bursting off the sun-dazzled facets of the waves sweeping in to crash against the base of the craggy limestone cliffs.

  “No,” answered Japrisot, “he’s following the coast.”

  “You’ve done this before,” said Holliday.

  “Bien sûr,” answered Japrisot. “Several times.”

  They spent the rest of the afternoon and into the early evening tracking the Citroën along the length of the Côte d’Azur, stopping to make deliveries in the towns of Cassis and La Ciotat, then bypassing the larger city of Toulon before stopping again in Hyeres, Bregancon, Le Rayo
l and Frejus.

  In Cassis the van stopped in front of Chez Nino’s on the harbor front, delivered a box of fish and then moved on. It was the same each time they stopped. In Ciotat it was Kitch and Cook; in Hyeres it was the Hotel Ceinturon. Bregancon was a motel-style place called Les Palmiers; in Le Rayol it was a rustic-looking old winery called l’Huître et la Vigne—the Oyster and the Vine. In Frejus it was a gaudy Moroccan dining room called La Medina. In none of these places did he leave more than three of the boxes and usually only one. By the time the sun was beginning to set they had reached suburban Cannes and the huge Florida white slab of the Royal Casino Hotel in Mandelieu-la-Napoule, complete with a six-story-high blue and yellow flashing neon image of a slot machine on the side of the building. A little bit of Vegas on the French Riviera.

  The Casino Hotel was part of a complex of interconnected buildings right on the beach beside a river estuary that led back to the Cannes Marina and the Mandelieu Golf Course. Japrisot parked the Peugeot in the fifteen-minute lot in front of the hotel and they watched as Felix Valador took a dolly loaded with two boxes of fish around to a side entrance. Presumably he was going to the hotel kitchen.

  At the main entrance a good-looking, well-dressed European with a neatly trimmed Vandyke beard climbed out of a blue Audi Quattro with his beautiful companion and slipped one of the car jockeys a folded bill. The valet parker looked at the bill, saluted the bearded man and climbed into the Audi.

  “He paid him not to park the car in the big lot under the overpass,” explained the French cop, nodding toward the busy Avenue General de Gaulle behind them. “It’s blackmail, really. Local boys sneak into the parking lot and sometimes roll cars right into the water. P’tit loubards! Little hooligans. Worse than the English football yobs sometimes.”

  The elegant couple strolled into the hotel and the car jockey drove the Audi a hundred feet up the driveway. A few minutes later Valador reappeared with the empty dolly.

  “That’s eighteen boxes of fish spread over almost a hundred miles,” said Rafi from the backseat. “He can’t be making much money.”