Lost City of the Templars

by Paul Christopher

  There was an upended wooden box beside him with a PowerBar and a small bottle of Crystal Springs water. He suddenly realized how hungry and thirsty he was. He was no fool, though; he ate half the bar and drank half the water. Who knew when food or drink was going to come around again?

  The room came into focus as he chewed on the protein bar. Four bare walls of some kind of flimsy pressboard painted pale green, the ceiling made of old acoustic tiles stained by leaks and who knew how many cigarettes turning the squares a sick-looking nicotine shade? The floor was concrete covered with some kind of gray paint. The door was plain wood fitted with what appeared to be a brand-new Schlage lock.

  There was a calendar thumbtacked to the wall. June 1956 with a day circled in faded ink with a note: 400 LB. FF DARBY/FOB; KNOX. The top of the calendar had a picture of an old C47 with the name Tarpon Air Cargo on the fuselage and a red leaping tarpon on a deep blue background painted on the tail. At the bottom of the photograph was an address: JOSEPH BOSARGE FIELD BAYOU LA BATRE ALABAMA—WE GET IT WHERE YOU WANT WHEN YOU WANT.

  It was starting to make sense. No one would think twice about a trawler full of shrimp coming into an Alabama shrimp town, and he was willing to bet Joseph Bosarge Field hadn’t been used in decades. In all likelihood they were probably being kept here until they’d been questioned and/or a plane came in to take them wherever they were supposed to go.

  The year before, he’d read a Lee Child thriller about people being dropped from helicopters high over the Nevada desert. He knew from personal experience what that was like.

  He’d seen men from one of the Ranger Long Range Reconnaissance Patrols, or LRRPS, dropping suspected Vietcong spies from choppers up a thousand feet or so as an incentive for their colleagues to talk. Grisly, but effective. Taking a flight out into the gulf and dropping him and the others would be just as useful.

  First question—was he alone or were the others nearby? Holliday looked carefully at the walls and the ceiling, paying special attention to the industrial light fixture. He ran his hands across the walls at eye level and lower and examined the four corners.

  The room didn’t appear to be bugged and there was no telltale fuzzing of the texture of the walls where there might be a fiber-optic camera embedded. He went to the wall on his left and banged it hard with his fist. He waited, listening, but there was no response.

  He repeated the process on the left wall. This time he got an answer. It was in Morse code: dash, dot, dot—Delta—dash, dash, dash—Oscar—dash, dot, dash, dot—Charlie—dash, dash, dot, dot—Interrogative. “Doc?”

  Holliday rapped back a quick double tap—Affirmative. He stepped back. All Israelis did compulsory military service, but was Rafi old enough to have learned the old-fashioned code? On the other hand, Eddie almost certainly had. Holliday had a quick conversation through the wall.

  “Eddie?”

  “Yes.”

  “The others?”

  “Here. Next to me.”

  “Safe?

  “All good, I think. Other rooms. Where we are?”

  Holliday smiled. Even in Morse the Cuban could get his grammar screwed up. Or was it someone pretending to be Eddie? A shill put in to get information?

  “Your brother’s name?”

  “Domingo. Why you ask?”

  Holliday relaxed. “Checking.”

  A rapid dot-dot-dot-dash-dot for “Understood.”

  “How get out?”

  “Walls flimsy. Door flimsy, too.”

  “Count ten and go.”

  “Affirmative.”

  At five the door opened of its own accord and a grunt in White Star camo gear stepped into the room. No more tranquilizer guns. This one was holding a Mossberg 500 combat shotgun. There was a SIG Sauer P220 in an open holster on his hip. “Outside,” he said. “Slowly.”

  Holliday nodded once and did as he was told.

  24

  Holliday stepped out of the little room, the White Star man with the shotgun backing up, the big Mossberg aimed at his belly. Holliday found himself in an old-fashioned corrugated Quonset hut. The rusty metal curved above his head, and the far end had a pair of big sliding doors, both of which were open, flooding the entire space with natural light. Beyond the doors Holliday could see the front end of a white panel truck, and out on the cracked tarmac of a runway he saw an old C47 with its cargo door open. The livery was a two-tone blue-and-white with the name OPELOUSAS AIR TRANSPORT along the fuselage. Beyond that was a line of screening trees.

  Eddie, Peggy and Rafi appeared, Peggy and Rafi looking a bit dazed, Eddie with that hard look on his face that meant he was barely controlling his anger. There was no sign of Harrison Fawcett.

  Four folding wooden chairs were set out on the concrete. The chairs looked as old as the calendar on the wall of Holliday’s room. The guards gestured toward the chairs and they sat down.

  “Everyone okay?” Holliday asked.

  “We’re okay,” said Rafi.

  “Mama pinga,” Eddie said, sneering.

  “Not good.”

  “No good at all—for them.”

  “Not yet,” answered Holliday.

  Eddie began to hum his old campfire song; never a good sign. Very much like the grumbling sound the earth makes before a volcano is about to erupt.

  “Where’s Fawcett?” Holliday asked.

  “I never saw him after we came out of the cave. He just seemed to vanish,” answered Rafi.

  “Shut the fuck up!” one of the guards barked. They all shut up. All except Eddie, who kept on humming. A couple of minutes later a Lincoln Town Car swept in through the open doors of the Quonset hut. A man got out of the backseat. He was wearing an expensive suit, expensive shoes and had the self-assured stance of a patrician background. A pair of neon red half-frame bifocals were perched on the end of his nose.

  “Charlie Peace,” Holliday said. “I haven’t seen you since you ran that crappy little airline for us in Afghanistan. I seem to remember punching your lights out after one of your drunken jerk-off pilots killed six of my men by flying into a mountain.”

  “Times change, Colonel. I’m at the top of the heap now, and you’re the one down in the trenches.”

  “I guess we’ll have to wait until we see who the last man standing is, Charlie.”

  “I guess we will,” said Charles Peace, CEO of the Pallas Group and through them the owner of the largest private army in the world.

  “I notice Fawcett’s missing,” said Holliday, keeping his eyes on Peace. One of the guards brought the tall, dark-haired man a chair. He sat down, pulled a silver cigarette case out of the pocket of his suit and lit up, using what looked like a vintage Zippo with a U.S. Marine Corps seal.

  “You meet some Semper Fi guy in a bar somewhere and he sees that, you’ll be in trouble,” warned Holliday.

  “I rarely meet people in bars,” said Peace.

  “What about Fawcett?”

  “We discovered Mr. Fawcett quite some time ago,” Peace answered. “Like any man, he had his price. He’s been taking samples for us to examine. We’ve built a whole little corporation in Switzerland around his exotic little plants.” Peace crossed his legs, meticulously lifting the razor crease on his trousers. “That’s beside the point, of course. What I really want to know about is the disposition of the relic.”

  Holliday laughed, his voice ringing in the old airplane hangar. “What is it with you people and relics?” He shook his head. “You really think some Holy Grail or Shroud of Turin or the Ark of the Covenant is going to give you supreme power?

  “Hitler thought that and he was nuts. I just don’t get it. I’ve been ducking you people for years because you think I’ve got a direct line to Relics-R-Us? The Indiana Jones movies are great stories, but this is the real world we’re in, Charlie. You of all people should know that.

  “You’re a jacked-up mercenary in a sharp suit. You deal in reality every day. You really believe that these things have some kind of power you can use like some
sort of cosmic battery? If you do you’re as crazy as Adolf. Kate Sinclair might be that much of a loony, Charlie, but not you.”

  “Are you finished?” Peace asked.

  “For the moment,” answered Holliday.

  “Aliens,” said Peace.

  “Pardon?”

  “I have very little time for any of this, Colonel, but I’ll give you one or two examples, aliens being the first one. What do you think of the work of Erich von Däniken?”

  “Another loser.”

  “A loser who made millions of dollars, sold untold copies of his books in a hundred languages, spawned a television industry and put a rocket up the ass of the science fiction movie genre. In all, several billion dollars generated out of some odd xenophobia. You don’t call that power?”

  “The second example?”

  “Lourdes, St. Jude, the Basilica in Montreal, Jesus tacos, weeping Mary statues, Joan of Arc, Bethlehem, Dan Brown books, Satanist Masons, black helicopters. Faith, Colonel Holliday. It can move mountains, start wars, kill millions of people. And it’s intangible and invisible. It’s not the relic, Colonel. It’s the idea of the relic. It’s the idea of it that has the power.

  “There are two point eight billion Christians in the world. A hundred and fifty million Americans believe God created the universe in seven days. That’s half the population of the country, Colonel, and they all believe in the relic.

  “You could probably elect a president if you could get a photo op of him with his hand on it. If the Catholic Church had it—and let me assure you, they want it very badly—it could give them back all the power and credibility they’ve steadily been losing for the last two thousand years. Knowledge is power, Colonel Holliday, and the relic is the ultimate knowledge. God made manifest on the earth.”

  “Quite a speech, Charlie, but what does it have to do with me?”

  “The relic was in Fawcett’s idea of Jurassic Park. His father saw it almost a hundred years ago. It’s not in Jurassic Park now.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “We looked.” Peace dropped his cigarette and ground it out with the sole of his expensive-looking shoe. “So where is it?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Of course you do, Colonel. That Hiram character showed it to you.”

  “Who told you that, Fawcett?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And you believe him.”

  “Certainly. More than I believe you.”

  “What about Hiram? Did you speak to him?”

  “Never found him. Fawcett knew a lot of places to look, but if the old man existed in the first place, he must have slipped away.”

  “Charlie,” chided Holliday, “I thought you were a big-time executive now. You can’t put those two facts together? The relic and the man whose entire family going back to the beginning was charged with protecting it have both disappeared?”

  Peace’s expression darkened. He turned to one of the guards. “Duct-tape all of them, hands behind their backs, feet, as well. Load them onto the plane when it comes and when you get far enough out over the gulf, toss them through the cargo hatch and keep on tossing until one of them talks. Keep the colonel for last; let him watch his friends go screaming into eternity. Maybe then he’ll feel more like talking. Call me when he does. I’m going into town for some crab claws at Sidney’s.”

  • • •

  William Copeland Black, late of MI5, recently seconded to “Big Sister” MI6, sat in Pat Philpot’s office at the National Center for Counterterrorism in Tysons Corner in Virginia sipping a glass of Philpot’s cheap scotch and watching as the fat man across from him methodically wheezed and chewed his way through a Mighty Caesar Chicken Salad, a matched pair of Double Big Macs, a side of fries, a snack of twelve McNuggets and a large Oreo McFlurry with two caramel apple pies thrown into the McFlurry just for fun.

  Black could almost feel the man’s tortured heart crying out for mercy, and the overflowing ashtray on the man’s desk didn’t say much for the state of his lungs. Black remembered the scene in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life when Mr. Creosote literally exploded from gorging at a restaurant.

  Philpot paused in his suicidal grazing of the foodlike objects spread across his desk, lit a Marlboro and leaned back in his frighteningly straining office chair. “Where are we on all this crap?” Philpot jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the complicated connective “nodes” chart on the whiteboard behind him.

  “Murky at best,” answered Black. “There are links between the Vatican Bank, White Horse Resources and all the rest of Lord Grayle’s evil empire, your fellow Peace’s Pallas Group, the disappearance of Percy Fawcett eighty or ninety years ago and various and sundry assassinations, most of them in Italy but one in Switzerland. Grayle’s involvement with White Glove or the Masons or whatever secret society is the big thing these days that seems to provide some connective tissue, as well, much of it through Kate Sinclair. All very obscure.”

  “You see the locus of all of this? The spider at the center of the web, even though he doesn’t know it?” Philpot said, inhaling deeply.

  “Lieutenant Colonel John Holliday,” responded Black, sighing. “We’ve run across him more than once,” he said. “His uncle Henry Granger worked with us as far back as World War Two, along with a man named Sir Derek Carr-Harris.”

  “We’ve had a relationship with him since Iraq—the first one. The Vatican doesn’t like him, Kate Sinclair blames him for the suicides of both her son and her daughter and the company’s had trouble with him from one end of the world to the other.”

  “On the other hand, he saved your bacon and mine during that Cuba fiasco.”

  Philpot finished his cigarette and picked up a McNugget, dipping it into three separate sauces and popping it into his mouth before it dripped on his tie.

  “I think we’ve got to pull him off the game board,” said Philpot, chewing.

  “Neutralize him?”

  “I’m afraid so. Some rigorous interrogation first, but in the end he needs to go. So does his friend the Cuban. I don’t know how much he’s told his cousin Miss Blackstock and her husband, but they’ll have to go, as well.”

  “May I ask why?”

  “Because he knows far more than is good for him and far more than both your government and mine think is good for them.

  “Look at the chart. He’s central to all of it. We’re talking about what game designers call the ‘Overworld.’ Governments don’t run the world—these people and organizations do. Most people aren’t even aware of it. It’s the big machine, Mr. Black, and Colonel Holliday keeps on putting a monkey wrench through the gears. He just won’t leave the status quo alone, I’m afraid. It’s not in Doc’s nature, I suppose, which is why he really does have to go.”

  • • •

  It was Eddie who made the first move. A few moments after Peace drove off in his limo, a third guard appeared carrying a brown paper bag in his hand. He pulled out a roll of duct tape and stepped forward, putting his hand on Eddie’s shoulder.

  “Me cago en tu madre, cabrón!” Eddie lurched upward, hammering his shoulder into the guard’s solar plexus, then slipped on the oily floor and fell back, knocking Holliday out of his chair. He struggled to get up, but one of the other guards stepped forward and clubbed Eddie with the butt of his riot gun.

  They were taped hand and foot with a strip across their mouths for good measure, and then one by one they were loaded onto the plane waiting outside. One of the guards remained behind to wait for Peace to return, and the other two climbed onto the plane.

  Holliday had been the first one dumped onto the ribbed metal floor of the old transport, and he could see that there was only one man in the cockpit. After five minutes of going through his procedures, the twin engines guttered into asthmatic life, then leveled off and the pilot started the old girl moving.

  Holliday carefully opened his clenched fist and checked the small object Eddie had forced into his hand during his dr
amatic little tirade in the old hangar. It was about four inches long, thin and extremely sharp for the first inch of its length. At a guess Eddie had found a loose spring in the iron bed in his little room and worked it loose. Presumably he was carrying a piece of the spring, as well.

  Holliday began to work with it, twisting the piece of metal around in his hand and poking, then sawing at the tape.

  It took more than twenty minutes, but he finally managed to cut through the tape. He checked the disposition of the guards. They were both sitting on the old jump seats directly across from him, Mossbergs between their legs, chatting with the pilot, completely ignoring their bound and gagged passengers.

  That was about to change.

  Holliday suddenly lifted his knees, dug in his heels and tried to lift his shoulders into a sitting position against the jump seats on the opposite side of the aircraft.

  The guard directly in front of him growled and stood up, the Mossberg raised to clout him as he’d done to Eddie in the hangar. As he stepped forward, Eddie swung his legs around, sweeping the guard off his feet. The Mossberg went flying and the guard fell directly on top of Holliday, who pulled his hands out from under him.

  He used one hand to grab the throat of the guard’s camo BDUs and bring him down even harder while the hand holding the piece of steel drove up and buried itself in the guard’s throat.

  As blood gurgled and spat from the guard’s neck, Eddie found the holster on his hip, grabbed the SIG Sauer and planted three rounds in the second guard—two to the chest and one to the head. The whole thing took less than fifteen seconds. Holliday tore the tape away from his mouth.

  “Shit!” Holliday yelled. “The pilot!” The man from the cockpit pushed his way into the cargo bay, some sort of weapon in his hand. Eddie reacted instinctively, emptying the last five rounds from the SIG into the man, blowing back toward the cockpit. The plane flew on without a twitch, brainlessly taking them farther and farther out into the Gulf of Mexico. Somewhere during the DC3’s long life, Holliday guessed an autopilot had been installed.

  Holliday and Eddie freed Peggy and Rafi, then opened one of the “barn doors” of the cargo hatch and tossed the bodies of the two guards and the pilot out into the clear, bright blue of the afternoon sky. Five thousand feet straight down into the dark waters of the gulf. They wrestled the door closed and walked back toward the front of the plane.