Lost City of the Templars

by Paul Christopher

  “No kidding,” whispered Peggy, looking up toward the roof of the cave. Even the entrance was beyond cathedral-like proportions, a towering arch four or five hundred feet high and a football field across. The cave itself was twenty times that wide and the roof, barely visible, must have been two thousand feet above them. The cave was easily large enough to land several helicopters, and at the far end of the unbelievably large space, a waterfall dropped down out of the darkness, the water’s nearly mile-high fall turning to a silken mist when it hit the cavern floor, feeding a chain of small black-colored lakes joined together like pearls on a string by a wide bubbling stream.

  “Notice anything?” Holliday asked.

  “No bats, no stalactites or stalagmites,” said Rafi. “The waterfall looks pure enough, but there’s something in it that turns it black. That can’t be healthy. It usually means high concentrations of sulfur. And notice that the vegetation stops right at the entrance. No sunlight, no photosynthesis. There weren’t even a few birds flying in and out. This place is dead.”

  “Una caverna de fantasma,” said Eddie. “A cave of ghosts.”

  “Well, one thing’s clear,” said Peggy. “Our giant dragonfly didn’t come from here.”

  “Where is the Devil’s Throat?” Holliday asked, turning to Tanaki. The young man conferred with his grandfather. Nenderu, leaning on a long stave he’d cut for himself in the past few days, led the way. They walked along the perimeter of the cave for a thousand feet or so, bypassing huge, sharp-edged boulders and long tongues of scree that had fallen from the roof of the cave unknown millions of years ago.

  Nenderu pointed with his stave.

  “There,” said Tanaki, pointing to yet another pile of rocks and boulders. “Up there.”

  They climbed toward a dark shadow that seemed to run the entire height of the cave. As she stepped closer, Peggy’s eyes widened. “That’s the way up? Not a chance.”

  “It is your only chance, I am afraid,” Tanaki answered. The way up was a narrow cleft or “chimney” in the rock. It had been pegged with narrow slabs of rock pushed into deeply chiseled cracks in the walls of the crevice, and where there were no pegs there were rickety lengths of stairs between them.

  The whole thing looked like a single curling strand of DNA going up into black nothingness. Every few steps there seemed to be a squared-off niche cut into the stone. At the base of the pool was a bubbling pool of bright yellow mud. The smell was foul, like dozens of rotten eggs.

  “Sulfur dioxide,” said Rafi, looking down at the bubbling, rotting mess.

  “The Devil has this acid reflux you see on television, I think,” said Eddie.

  “We don’t have to climb that today, do we?” Peggy asked.

  “No, it’s almost sunset. We’ll camp in the cave tonight and start up first thing tomorrow.”

  “When we’re climbing, is there any way to avoid the smell?” Peggy asked.

  “Climb as fast as you can,” said Holliday.

  • • •

  Lord Adrian Grayle, CEO of White Horse Resources and present grand master of the White Glove, sat in his office on the top floor of the Gherkin, the vibrator-shaped skyscraper at 30 St. Mary Axe in London. At that moment he was in the midst of a closed-circuit video conference with Leo Krall, the head of Jericho Defense Alternatives, White Horse’s security division, in its large, bunkerlike facility in the subbasement of the building. The screen he was using was an enormous black rectangle built into the wall of his office opposite his desk.

  “So, what are we dealing with?” Grayle asked.

  “It looks like some concentrated effort against the dam,” said Krall, wearing the simple dark blue uniform of the JDA. Krall was in his late fifties, square-faced, lean and with hair the color of streaked granite.

  “Show me,” instructed Grayle.

  The huge screen instantly switched from a near-life-sized figure of Krall to a satellite image of northeastern Amazonia Province. It zoomed in on a large area of bright green with one fist-sized patch of red in the center right. Striations of dark blue ran through the entire frame of the image like tiny blood vessels leading into larger veins.

  “What am I looking at?”

  “An infrared image of the area about fifty miles from the dam site,” said Krall.

  “The red are the Indians.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “How many?”

  “Approximately three hundred, sir.”

  “Excellent.”

  “And our personnel at the dam?”

  “Evacuate them.”

  “The Indians in those kinds of numbers could do a great deal of damage, sir.”

  “I should bloody well hope so, Krall. That’s the whole point, after all.”

  • • •

  Yachay, leader of his people, was leading them and four hundred other warriors of the river tribes north to defeat the gray monster. He knew this was the right thing to do from his xhenhet vision and had convinced the other shamans in the villages he passed through to reach his destination. Within six days of travel he had every warrior the river tribes could offer, and on the seventh day they reached their quarry and stood looking in awe at the monster from the very edge of the forest. They had seen no place and no thing like it.

  “What is this place?” asked Taroya, a Munduruku whose tribe had migrated north many seasons ago.

  “It is the place of the beast, the monster.” Beyond the edge of the forest, the jungle had been stripped down to its sandy soil, the roots of every tree torn out of the ground like rotten teeth. The trees were piled in huge pyres that were burned for days, signal fires to the death of the forest. Littered over the barren landscape were dozens of gigantic earthmovers, scrapers and giant dump trucks on wheels the height of a grown man, and through it all ran a wide muddy stream—the source of the river that gave these men life. Beyond all this in the far distance was the monster itself, a great gray slab of concrete eight hundred feet high that ran the width of the Xingu Valley from one side to the other.

  “We cannot defeat these things,” said Taroya. “We have only blowpipes and bows and arrows and our spears.”

  “We can do it,” said Yachay. “I know this because I have seen it in my vision, and my vision is the future.” Yachay paused, staring out at the desolation. “But my vision says we must wait for the rain and wait for the night, and that is what we shall do.”

  • • •

  They gathered by the Devil’s Throat just as the sun began to rise over the rain forest canopy. Birds outside in the dense jungle were coming into full song, and once again the forest was alive.

  “Let’s get this done,” said Peggy. “The longer we wait, the more nervous I get.”

  “My grandfather says we must wait. He knows this place,” Tanaki said. “He also asks if you will step back a few feet.”

  “Why?” Peggy asked stubbornly.

  In response there was a deep rumbling from deep beneath the ground under their feet. It continued for at least a minute, and then the sulfur pool at the foot of the rock chimney seemed to begin boiling.

  “What the hell … ?”

  A gout of ulcerous mud rose fifty feet into the air, steam hissing as it shot up. There was a deeper-rooted explosion under their feet and the sulfur mud became white-hot steam that rose higher and higher within the chamber and then only a few seconds later subsided. The superior pool subsided and there was no sign that anything had happened.

  “We would have been killed,” said Rafi.

  “My grandfather says you must wait for the steps to cool and to dry before you begin to climb.”

  “Does it happen regularly?” Holliday asked, thinking of Old Faithful.

  “There is no way to tell,” said Tanaki.

  “So either we stay here or we take our chances,” said Holliday. He thought for a moment. “You don’t have to follow, but I’m going up to the top.”

  “I will come with you, compadre,” said Eddie. “Our fates are bound, I thi
nk, my friend.”

  “Glad to have the company.” Holliday grinned.

  “Well, you’re not leaving us behind,” said Peggy, taking Rafi’s hand in hers.

  Nenderu had a brief conversation with his grandson, and Tanaki translated. “My grandfather will lead you,” he said. “He can think of no better place to die than seeking entrance to the heavens, and if not that, he would very much like to see where the gods live. It is forbidden for me to go with you. I will wait for your return here.”

  The climb went without incident, except for Peggy’s complaints about becoming hard-boiled like eggs in a pot. The ascent took more than an hour and their lungs were aching when they reached the surface.

  “What the hell?” said Holliday, looking around. They seemed to have come up into a formal, well-tended garden of paths and beds of flowers interspersed with fruit trees. The air smelled of blossoms, and the trees surrounding the gardens swayed slightly in a gentle breeze.

  “El Jardín del Edén,” whispered Eddie.

  Nenderu fell to his knees and began to chant as a man came out of the surrounding forest and approached. The man was quite short with curly hair flowing past his shoulders and a long, dark and well-oiled beard. He wore a twisted quoit of fabric around his head and a long robe studded with gems. He stopped in front of the group in front of him and bowed. He straightened, put his palms together and introduced himself. When he spoke it was in perfect English with the heavy accents of Spain, even though it was clear that he was not a native of either country.

  “Welcome. I am Hiram, king of Tyre and all Phoenicia, the one hundred and twentieth of that name.”

  16

  Vincent Lamberto sat in his office of the Telecom Italia building and looked out at the distant skyline of Rome. With his position as head of Romacorp, the largest multinational in the country, his close personal friendship with the Holy Father and his recent investiture in the Order of St. Sebastian all made him the perfect candidate for the chairmanship of the Vatican Bank.

  There was only one problem—Vincent Lamberto was broke. Between his attempted takeover of White Horse and the convulsions of the European monetary systems, he was spread so thin that the slightest downtick in the world markets would put him over the edge.

  For the last year Romacorp had been flying on fumes in what was actually a giant Ponzi scheme that was going to have Lamberto’s head on a stick when the structure went into its inevitable collapse. To make matters even worse, for the past year he’d borrowed vast amounts of money from P2, the fascist Catholic organization born out of the Second World War and now the biggest thing in European organized crime. It was a nightmare and Lamberto could see no chance of awakening from it.

  Except to run. He had two hundred million euros in a Swiss account and a complete alternative identity waiting for him in a safe-deposit box. It would mean leaving his wife, children and mistress behind to take the fury that would come down on the name of Lamberto, but so be it. His wife had given him three children who whined like infants into their thirties, two of whom still lived at home. He was a sixty-five-year-old man who still had some time left to enjoy life, and a lot of life could be enjoyed on two hundred million euros in some country like Brazil, which had no extradition treaty with Italy.

  • • •

  Captain James Calthrop, Royal Marines Third Commando Unit (retired), landed at Fiumincino Airport and took a taxi to the Cavalieri Hotel, where Constantine had made reservations for him. Contrary to fiction, men in his occupation always preferred a large anonymous hotel over a romantic pension tucked away in some side street. For one thing the pension usually had bedbugs or roaches and it didn’t have room service. There was obscurity in numbers, and as his old colonel used to say, “Better to lie in a field of thin stalks of grass than to hide behind a single tree.”

  He arrived at the hotel, signed in and went upstairs. He swiftly unpacked his one small bag, then showered. That done, he enjoyed a room service lunch of carpaccio di manzo con la sua salsa, gazpacho andaluso and risotto ai frutti di mare followed by tiramisu and strong black coffee.

  Constantine arrived exactly at two thirty. Calthrop had ordered coffee for two, knowing the tall slender man’s penchant for punctuality, so there was plenty for both of them. Calthrop had worked with Constantine on several previous occasions, but he’d never got a read on the man other than a certain ascetic aura that could have been something in the man’s background or a flat affect during their meetings to further his need for privacy. It didn’t really matter to Calthrop and he’d long ago accepted the man for what he said he was—a middleman between Calthrop and those who required his services.

  Calthrop was equally vague about himself. He always flew out of his home in the Bahamas via some other country, traveled on a Canadian passport and as chance would have it he spoke Italian like a native after spending three years in Florence getting a completely useless degree in art history for no other reason than obscuring his real origins. He’d even picked up a package of Yesmoke cigarettes at the airport instead of smoking his own Senior Service brand. In the twenty-first century, anonymity was a rare commodity and something to be protected and valued.

  Constantine sat down in one of the two armchairs set beside the panoramic view of the city from the glass balcony doors. “Mr. Calthrop.” Constantine nodded, speaking in Italian.

  “Mr. Constantine,” answered Calthrop in the same language.

  “You read the file I sent you?”

  “Of course.”

  “What’s your opinion?”

  “A powerful man with powerful friends. Allied with P2, a group his father had been involved with shortly after the war.”

  “How would you do it?”

  “Find out about his daily movements. The usual way—a single shot from a distance, an explosive bullet or a fléchette. He has no real security except for his driver and a single bodyguard.”

  “I’m afraid we don’t have that sort of luxury with this target. We have it on good authority that he’s fleeing his debts via Switzerland. He’s flying out tomorrow evening on a Swiss European flight into Zurich. And there can be no use of a bullet; it must look like an accident or at the very least a suicide.”

  “Suicides are complicated, accidents even more so,” said Calthrop. He took out a cigarette and lit it.

  “He’s probably heading for Brazil if that helps.”

  “Presumably because they have no extradition treaty with Italy.”

  “We’re assuming that, yes.”

  “It’s going to increase costs considerably.”

  “Your fee? That can be dealt with.”

  “It’s going to increase other costs. I may need to make purchases, employ watchers. You’ve just made the project much more difficult.”

  “Not by choice.”

  “You want something else,” said Calthrop, looking directly into Constantine’s eyes.

  “Yes,” the man calling himself Constantine said. There was no point in lying. “We need to recover two hundred million euros from this man. He may also be carrying documents, either in written or electronic form. First of all, you must retrieve those documents.”

  “And the money?” Calthrop asked.

  “He will have wired it to whatever his eventual destination is. Before he … is dealt with, you must find out where it has gone and into what account.”

  “A bonus will be required.”

  “Fifteen percent.”

  “Thirty,” said Calthrop.

  “Twenty-five,” replied Constantine.

  “Agreed.”

  “So, you’ll take the job?”

  “I have to think about it. Give me one hour and then call me.”

  “Time is of the essence here,” said Constantine.

  “An hour,” repeated Calthrop firmly. “I’ll give you your answer then.”

  Constantine left the suite and Calthrop poured himself another cup of coffee. The Italian never showed any hint of emotion, but this afterno
on Calthrop had sensed evasion. Calthrop had completed eight projects for Constantine, all without any problem, but somehow this was different. There had been a note of finality in the austere-looking man’s face, and Calthrop had an idea why. This one was personal and even when it was resolved, there could be nothing to connect Constantine to it.

  So there would be a ghost, a killer watching a killer, and when it was over Calthrop would die. But Calthrop had dealt with ghosts before, and this time Constantine or whoever he was would be severely punished for his lack of trust. An hour later Constantine called and Calthrop gave him his simple answer.

  “Yes.”

  • • •

  The man calling himself Hiram, king of Tyre and all Phoenicia, led them through what could only be described as a small paradise. There were flowering trees and plants turning the air into fragrant perfume, orchards of exotic fruits like pomegranates and tamarind and meandering crystal streams and pools that were almost dreamlike.

  There was no way that any of it was likely to be seen from the air or by satellite since the whole area was surrounded by canopy forest that allowed full light onto the gardens for only a few minutes each day. At most times the shadows cast by the huge trees would disguise the natural treasure far below them.

  “Your English is very good,” said Holliday, walking beside the regally dressed man.

  “I had a good teacher,” answered Hiram. “All of us did. It’s the language of this place and has been for almost a hundred years.”

  “All of you?”

  “Yes, we are a nation in the skies and I am its king. It has always been so.”

  They walked through the gardens until they finally reached a large outcropping of rock, which, as they neared it, Holliday saw was actually the artificially hidden entrance to a narrow cave. Entering the opening behind Hiram, Holliday saw that even the cavern was artificial and clearly hewn out of the stone by human hands.

  At the far end of the tunnellike structure, there was a wide circular staircase descending into the ground. As they began to go down the steps in single file, Holliday saw that the stairway was eerily lit by natural light coming from narrow carved slots in the rock wall.