The Templar Cross

by Paul Christopher

  “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, Standartenführer 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.

  “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 attaché 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.

  Using a map of Rome and Vince Caruso’s familiarity with the city, they concocted a Robert Ludlum-Jason Bourne, cat-and-mouse, hither-and-yon, hares-and-hounds game across the city that would supposedly lead the priest and his men to where the exchange of Peggy for the location of the bullion would take place. In fact, it would all be a figment of their collective imaginations, the moves and countermoves orchestrated with generic, throwaway cell phones and overseen by Lieutenant Caruso driving his Italian girlfriend’s Dragon Red Vespa GTS-250 scooter. With the paper chase concentrating Father Thomas and his colleagues, Holliday, Rafi and Tidyman would meet at the Marconi Bridge on the downstream River Tiber, then board a river sightseeing cruiser down to the old ruins at Ostia Antica, Rome’s original port, now two miles inland after the deposit of three thousand years’ worth of accumulated river silt.

  If things went according to plan they would discover a speedboat left for them by Vince Caruso at the marina where the sightseeing boat docked, which they would then use to reach the fishing shack where Peggy was being held hostage.

  Like most rescue plans it looked perfect on paper, and like most rescue plans, as Holliday well knew, it would be anything but perfect in its execution. Still, it wasn’t bad for something put together in a hurry. In every theater of war Holliday had fought in, he’d seen much worse plans generated by entire committees of so-called experts, and over the years he’d developed a basic rule of thumb: in war, just like cooking, too many cooks just screwed things up. In his own mind it was all pretty straightforward. Find Peggy, kill anybody who got in their way, grab her and get the hell out of town as quickly as possible.

  The Ponte Guglielmo Marconi crossed the Tiber River south of Rome in a surprisingly rural area, especially on the southern side. The dock for the sightseeing boats was located a little downstream of the wide modern bridge on the bank of the river, squeezed in between a junior league rugby field and some fenced- off public tennis courts. The only way to get to it was down a dirt road that seemed to peter off the farther along you went. If it hadn’t been for Lieutenant Caruso’s detailed directions none of them would have ever found it. On the other hand, it was the perfect spot for a rendezvous; if anyone was following you they could be spotted a mile off. The boat was a small converted passenger ferry named, not surprisingly, the M.V. Horatio. She had three wedding-cake decks
outfitted with restaurant-style booths set beside large tinted picture windows.

  Holliday arrived first and waited on the dock, receiving updates from Caruso on his cell phone every few minutes. As far as the young lieutenant could see everything was going according to plan. Father Thomas had successfully retrieved the cell phone left for him in the potted shrub by Tidyman and had begun his wild-goose chase. According to Caruso there was no sign of the bald Father Damaso.

  At eleven forty Emil Tidyman arrived, improbably dressed as a tourist in a Hawaiian shirt, a straw hat and big sunglasses with both binoculars and a camera hung around his neck. Ten minutes later Rafi appeared on the dock. As far as Holliday could tell neither man had been followed. He waited until they were about to pull in the gangplank before he boarded the broad-beamed, top-heavy ferry, and shortly afterward the M.V. Horatio eased out into the turbid green water and began making its ponderous way downstream.

  They made their way along the sinuous snaking river for an hour. It wasn’t very exciting as sightseeing trips went; the great buildings and monuments of Rome had been built farther upstream, centered on the city’s seven hills. For the most part all there was to see was the pastoral weed-choked banks of the river and the spans of various modern bridges. The advantage to Holliday and his companions was that taking the sightseeing boat made pursuit unlikely, if not impossible.

  The Horatio eventually turned in toward shore and docked at a comfortably ramshackle pier at Ostia Antica. The ruins, an entire city of them, were spread out over hundreds of acres. The buildings, no more than crumbling walls and tiled floors, were silent testament to the ancient port city’s violent end.

  In A.D. 67 bands of roving pirates had descended on the city in ragtag fleets, burning everything as they went, eventually leading to the enactment of the Lex Gabinia, the law of Gabianus, its creator, giving the emperor of Rome far-reaching and completely arbitrary powers that were reminiscent of the panicked regulations enacted after 9/11.