Lost City of the Templars

by Paul Christopher

  “I have a question,” said Peggy.

  “Shoot,” said Holliday.

  “Does anyone know how to fly this crate?”

  Arturo Bonnifacio, Cardinal Ruffino, secretary of state for the Holy See, met with his Secret Service director and longtime lover, Vittorio Monti, in the back room at Dino and Tony’s. The cardinal was enjoying a plate of deep-fried artichoke leaves called carciofi alla giudia and a glass of Epomeo Colli del Sangro. Monti sipped an espresso.

  The cardinal ate one of the crunchy, nutty leaves, then took a sip of wine. “What is our present status?”

  “Calthrop is dead, so is DiMarco, the cutout and Garibaldi, or at least he hasn’t sent us his scheduled contact.”

  “Calthrop, you’re sure?”

  “I did it myself. Either he or DiMarco was going to come through the door of the safe house. It was Calthrop, which meant that DiMarco was dead.”

  “None of this will come back to us, I hope.”

  “Of course not. They both knew me only as Constantine. The landlord rents to a man named Francesco Landini. We have our own in-house cleaners. The apartment will be spotless by now.”

  “Holliday and his people?”

  “Holliday’s chip is still working. Apparently he is in some godforsaken place called Bayou La Batre in the state of Alabama.”

  “At last glimpse he was in northern Brazil seeking out the relic. Why would he be in such a place?”

  “I would say from the evidence that Grayle or another of your brother’s friends has him.”

  “What do you suggest we do?”

  “For the time being, nothing. If the relic exists we’ll hear about it. My sense is that Holliday is being interrogated. If the interrogation is successful, he will almost certainly be disposed of. Let the others involved in this paper chase do the work for us.”

  “We cannot let Grayle’s people have it,” Cardinal Ruffino said emphatically. “It is too much power. It would tip the scales at a time when such a thing could virtually destroy us. We are already on the brink of insolvency.” Ruffino shook his head. “My own brother,” he whispered. “How could he?”

  “Your brother is a pawn, a tailor with delusions of grandeur. What he does he does to hurt you.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he is weak. And because he is envious of you. You have achieved greatness, and perhaps even more awaits you. He is nothing and never will be.”

  “You are a harsh man, Vittorio.”

  “It is a harsh world, Arturo.”

  25

  “Eddie trained in the Cuban Air Force,” said Holliday. He turned to his friend.

  “Helicopters,” said Eddie. “Not in tractors like this.”

  “You must have had some training on fixed-wing aircraft. You flew that thing we stole in Russia.”

  “That thing was an Antonov-2, a single-engine biplane that a good horse could outrun. It is used for crop-dusting. It also happens to be the only fixed-wing I ever trained on, amigo.”

  “Oh, crap,” Peggy said. “We’ve got fifty miles of water underneath us and no Sully Sullenberger to drive the bus.”

  “Qué?” Eddie said.

  “Forget it,” answered Peggy.

  “Look,” said Rafi. “Eddie’s the only one who’s had any flying training at all. We can either sit here flying toward the Yucatán until we run out of gas or Eddie can strap into the pilot’s thing and try to get us back on the ground.”

  “Rafi’s right,” said Holliday. “We really don’t have any other way to go.”

  “You will be my copilot, compañero?”

  “Sure,” said Holliday.

  “Is there anything we can do?” Peggy asked.

  “Pray, Senora Peggy. Pray very hard.”

  Eddie slipped into the pilot’s bucket seat, touching nothing, his eyes scanning the controls to his right, the instrument panel in front of the yoke and the overhead electronics panel. “There is no automatic pilot here,” said Eddie. “This airplane is very Cuban. A pair of engines and some wings.”

  “The plane was flying that steadily all by itself?” Holliday said.

  “It would seem that way, my friend,” the Cuban answered. “Rudder pedals, ailerons, throttles, pitch. Maybe Senora Peggy was right. This really is a guagua.”

  “Gwah-gwah?” Holliday asked.

  “Bus,” answered Eddie, still studying the controls. He spent a few more moments figuring out the basic layout and then nodded. “First we must turn the bus around.”

  Holliday had his eye on the simple float compass mounted dead center on top of the dashboard or whatever you called it on an airplane. They had been flying almost due southeast into an almost black horizon heavy with storm clouds.

  “Left rudder, turn left,” he muttered. He eased his foot down on the left pedal and gently gripped the yoke and turned it in the same direction. Slowly but surely the lumbering DC3 began to turn. There was a sudden, unpleasant coughing sound.

  “What’s that?” Holliday asked. Eddie toggled a switch on a floor plate at the foot of the console, and there was a definite surge of power.

  “Reserve tanks,” explained Eddie.

  Holliday’s eyes were glued to the float compass. As slowly as Eddie turned the aircraft around, the needle on the compass swung through a hundred eighty degrees. After a long three minutes, the compass read north by northwest. “That’s it,” said Holliday quietly.

  Eddie eased his foot off the pedal and turned the yoke back until there wasn’t even a flutter on the compass needle.

  “Now what?” Holliday said.

  “We must lose altitude and much speed before we attempt to reach the ground.”

  Holliday checked the instrument panel in front of him. According to the gauges and dials, they were flying at just under two hundred miles per hour at eight thousand feet. He’d flown at thirty-eight thousand feet in a hundred passenger jets, but sitting here a mile and a half in the air seemed much higher.

  They flew on for another half an hour, Eddie checking out the feel of the plane with delicate movements of the yoke. Holliday kept his mouth shut, his eyes on the compass course and occasionally checking over his shoulder at the blackening sky behind them. By his estimation they had less than thirty minutes to get the old bird onto the ground before the gathering tropical storm rolled over them and tore her wings off like a fly caught in a swirling toilet bowl.

  The land ahead of them grew into a broad, thick line that slowly began to fill the bottom of the windscreen. “Time to go down, amigo,” said Eddie. He eased back the throttle on both of the big engines, adjusted the flaps and nudged the yoke forward smoothly.

  The aircraft’s nose came down and she went into a smooth, shallow descent. Holliday turned his attention to the altimeter, eyes fixed on the dial as it spun downward, going through hundreds of feet like the second hand on a wristwatch. Holliday checked over his shoulder again; the storm was frighteningly close.

  “Big storm on our tail, Eddie. We don’t get down soon, it’s going to be bad.”

  Eddie took a quick look over his shoulder. “Coño!”

  Almost instantly there was a rattling sound from the rear of the aircraft that sounded as though they were being strafed by some monstrous machine gun in the clouds. The sound was deafening and suddenly it was coming from directly overhead as golf-ball-sized pieces of hail hammered at the cockpit roof and began shattering on the Plexiglas in front of them.

  Holliday had spotted the wiper switch right under the compass and leaned forward in his seat, toggling it on. The wipers heaved into life, smearing and scattering the skin of slush forming on the glass, and Eddie instinctively pushed the nose forward, changing their dive angle steeply and sending the engines into a screaming paroxysm as he simultaneously throttled back.

  Below them the waters of the gulf, broken and whitecapped, filled the windscreen. The crackling of lightning exploded around them, and the entire aircraft shuddered and rattled as the hail turned to rain so heavy the
wipers only gave the smallest shred of visibility for an eyeblink of time.

  Holliday watched the altimeter and as it spun its way down to a thousand feet, Eddie hauled back on the yoke, desperately trying to pull them out of the careening dive into the yawning cavernous abyss of the ocean below. At eight hundred feet Holliday felt the nose begin to come up. At six he could see land dead ahead and at three they thundered over the beach and the shrimp boats at the docks of Bayou la Batre.

  “El tren de aterrizaje de mierda!” Eddie screamed, his eyes widening as he throttled back. “The landing gear—where is it?”

  Eddie looked around frantically. Holliday followed suit. There was nothing on the panel in front of them and nothing that he could see on the throttle and pitch console between them. The altimeter showed two hundred feet and was still twisting down. Dead ahead Holliday could just make out the runway through the slashing rain that hurled itself at the windscreen. Outside, the wind was howling and it was all Eddie could do to hang on to the yoke of the aircraft as it pitched and heaved like a bull in a rodeo.

  As he muttered curses under his breath, the Cuban’s eyes flickered to the altimeter. Holliday looked. Fifty feet and still falling.

  “Hold on!” Eddie yelled. He reached out, grabbed the throttles and pushed them up and into the Off position, then hauled back on the yoke, bringing the nose of the aircraft up. The engines stuttered and then died, the now lifeless triple-bladed propellers chewing on dead air. At the last second the limousine Charlie Peace had arrived in rose like a black ghost coming out of the torrential downpour, and then they hit, slewing and bellying in on the grass beside the runway, spinning slowly, parts on the fuselage tearing off as it twisted around.

  The starboard-side wing hit the limousine first, the forty-six-foot-long metal blade hacking through the roof of the vehicle like a farmer’s scythe harvesting wheat. The plane continued its twisting journey along the grass, the tail assembly swinging around to hit the limousine a second time just as Charles Peace was desperately trying to exit what was left of the vehicle, crushing him into a bloody red smear against the bright white lower half of the plane.

  Finally, reaching the end of its long pirouette, the plane stood up on its nose a little, the two big engines tearing themselves to pieces as they chewed into the dark soil. At last the old DC3 came to a stop. For a moment there was only the endless roar of the rain and the ticking of the aircraft as it finally came to rest. Holliday realized he’d been holding his breath.

  “Bueno?” Eddie said quietly.

  “Bueno.” Holliday nodded.

  “A vow,” said Eddie.

  “Shoot,” said Holliday.

  “Never again,” said Eddie.

  “Agreed,” said Holliday, and both men began to laugh hysterically.

  Peggy poked her head into the cockpit. “Whenever you guys stop laughing at your man joke, we better think about getting out of here. I don’t think they get a lot of plane crashes around here, and buzzing the town at fifty feet or whatever it was is sure to have attracted attention.”

  “Yeah, and we just drove an airplane through the body of the man who owns the biggest private army in the world. That’s probably going to get us on CNN.”

  “So what do we do now?” Peggy asked.

  “We go to Miami,” said Rafi quietly. “I know someone there who can help us.”

  • • •

  William Copeland Black sat in the secure MI6 “Pod” in the U.K. Embassy complex just off Observatory Circle in Washington, D.C., just about the only place you could smoke without being chastised by one and all.

  Besides having the smoker’s lamp perpetually lit, the Pod was blanketed in every kind of electronic countermeasure available. It had a self-contained ventilation and sprinkler system and had been built as a building within a building, the single entrance and exit through six air-lock-style revolving doors, which required closed-circuit, electronic and biometric checks on the people trying to enter or leave.

  By those who worked there, it was generally referred to by its nickname, the Womb. The Womb lay in perpetual semidarkness lit mostly by the dozens of computer screens and desk lamps used by its occupants. The only relatively normal room in the place was the glass-walled conference area. The glass was electric and could be changed from translucent to opaque at the touch of a switch.

  There were three other people in the Womb with Black: the embassy’s commercial attaché and head of MI6 in the United States, Sir Alistair Sim; George Givens, representing the Home Office; and Roger Thornhill, the Womb’s senior tech analyst.

  “Apparently it’s open season on Holliday and his little entourage,” said Black. “Our cousins want him ‘off the game board,’ as Philpot put it. The Vatican has tried at least twice that we know of, and Kate Sinclair’s coven of witches and warlocks are hell-bent on boiling Holliday in oil.”

  “I understand Lord Grayle has a part to play in all of this, as well,” replied Sir Alistair.

  “For now he seems to have thrown in his lot with Sinclair and the Pallas Group, although I can’t see that lasting for very long.”

  “This can’t really be about some silly Indiana Jones artifact, can it?” George Givens asked. Givens was a thin, short and balding man who looked perpetually anxious. Black knew the type: a middle bureaucrat in the cogs of government terrified of putting a foot wrong. The kind of man who grew geraniums in his garden and made decisions like walking through glue.

  “Actually we’ve been connected with Holliday’s family since the war,” said Sir Alistair. “His uncle was one of us in the ’forties.”

  “He and a man named Carr-Harris,” said Black. “I’ve read the file.”

  “You really are quite well informed.” Sir Alistair smiled. “Supposedly they were working for the joint Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives section of the British and United States armies, trying to recover looted art and artifacts. What they were actually doing is a different story altogether.”

  “Do tell,” said Black.

  “They were following a number of clues that pointed to the existence of a ledger or notebook that listed all the banks, bank accounts, real estate, gold bullion and other treasures accumulated by the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon—the Templars. They might have been soldiers of Christ at one time, but they certainly weren’t poor.”

  “Poppycock,” said Givens. “Conspiracy nutters on the Interweb.”

  The MI6 head of station gave the little man a long, hard look. “Hardly that, Mr. Givens. They were today’s equivalent of the Stichting INGKA Foundation.”

  “It’s a Dutch charity that is just a little smaller than the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.”

  “Never heard of them,” scoffed Givens.

  “It owns IKEA among other things. We don’t really know what it does with its thirty-six billion dollars every year, just like the pope and the king of France didn’t know much about the Templars. A secretive bunch, I must say. But the king and the pope and our own dear Richard the Lion-Hearted borrowed heavily from them. Think of a tax-free status for the greatest usurers and loan sharks the world has ever seen. Derek Carr-Harris and Holliday’s uncle, Henry Granger, never found the ledger, but we think Holliday somehow did. And there are a great many dangerous people out there who would love to take it away from Holliday, or at least have a peek into its pages.”

  “So what do we do with him?” Black asked.

  “I suggest we go against the grain a little. Let’s bring him in and question him. If he’s uncooperative we can always throw him to the wolves again.” Sir Alistair turned to Thornhill, who was busily tapping away at the keyboard of his laptop. “Anything you can give us on Colonel Holliday’ s whereabouts, Roger?”

  “Just this,” said the analyst. He hit a key and a video image appeared on the wall-sized screen at the far end of the room. “We piggyback the American weather satellites as a matter of course. We intercepted this about ten minutes ago. It’s thermal; everythin
g else was obscured by the heavy rainfall.”

  The screen showed a psychedelic multicolored view from about a hundred feet overhead as a large, twin-engine aircraft headed in for a landing. Almost directly in front of it was the outline of a large automobile, the engine glowing bright red and almost obscuring the two blobs of heat within it.

  The shape of the airplane suddenly began to pirouette, one of the wings and its engine colliding directly with the automobile, the explosion of the engine obscuring the shape of the vehicle, which suddenly blossomed into a spreading heat pattern.

  The aircraft eventually stopped and after a moment four heat traces began to move away from it at a run. A hundred yards away from the downed plane, the four heat traces stopped and then disappeared within a slightly larger one that began to move away from the scene. The image went blank.

  “What exactly did we just see?” Sir Alistair asked.

  Thornhill explained, “An aircraft, probably an old DC3, belly-landed at a small airfield near Bayou La Batre, Alabama—Bayou La Batre is where they shot the shrimp boat scenes in Forrest Gump, by the way. At any rate, as it landed one wing of the downed aircraft swung around and slammed into a waiting vehicle, either a Cadillac Escalade or a limousine, from the size of the heat signature.

  “In the process the two passengers inside the vehicle were killed by the resulting explosion. The plane comes to rest and a few moments later four people exit the DC3 and run to a waiting panel van, something the size of a Renault Kangoo or a Ford Transit. Once in the van, they start it up and drive off.”

  “And what on earth does this have to do with our Colonel Holliday?” Givens, the man from the Home Office, asked.

  “Do shut up, won’t you?” Sir Alistair said. He turned to Thornhill. “Go on, then, Roger.”

  “This might explain things a little better,” said the analyst. He tapped a few keys on his computer, and a still image appeared on the big screen. “We know Holliday and his people have crossed swords with Kate Sinclair in all her incarnations, and we also know that Holliday has been seen in northern Brazil—Amazonia to be precise, an area with direct ties to our own Lord Grayle and the Pallas Group. This shot was taken fifteen minutes before the tropical storm now known as Mellissa struck Bayou La Batre.” The image now on the screen showed a limousine with a well-dressed man standing beside it smoking a cigarette or a cigar.