The Gold of the Knights Templar
Olivia Newton Series - Book 2
Preston William Child
Copyright © 2011, 2020 by Preston William Child
All rights reserved. No part of this publication might be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
Publisher's Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author's imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.
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Contents
Books by Preston William Child
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Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Epilogue
Books of this series in order
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About the Author
Prologue
Agent Kelly Ritter stepped out of his Ford truck with an air of importance customary of low-grade paper pushers in the agency. People like him flaunt the paraphernalia. They wore dark glasses, dark impeccably cut suits and trousers, the eponymous white shirt and black tie and shoes that shone so much you could see yourself on them.
He was looking at early retirement, hopeful of getting it if he pleased his superiors well. He was doing good. His hair was well cut, his girlfriend thought he was a great guy, she shared desires of marriage with him.
He flashed his badge at the gate. The guard in the security building waved him in with a casual gesture.
He was seeing his second special prisoner since he was transferred to the special unit.
With him was a doctor from the pool of physicians approved by the agency. The doctor was a new guy, the former doctor having slumped the day before while examining a cancer patient. The patient had disappeared.
The new doctor was a swarthy guy, clean-shaven and bespectacled. He looked too hard to be a doctor, and Kelly told him so.
"I get that a lot from my patience," said the doctor.
The brief in Kelly's pocket said the guy's name was Hans Mueller. He rather looked English than Jewish.
"Are you Jewish, doctor?"
"People always think I am," he smiled without teeth.
The two men rounded a corner in the hall. They went through three more metal doors, grim-looking security guards checked their identities in computer screens before letting them through.
Kelly smiled. It was a good day; he thought about his retirement again. It would be early, he was performing admirably.
They got to a door, metal, heavy; a burly security guard stood beside it. He said, "welcome agent Kelly," through bushy beards.
"How we looking, Rob, how's the prisoner today?"
"We are good, sir."
Kelly loved being addressed this way. It felt good to be called 'sir'. The door hissed open, and they stepped into a small room. A white-haired man was sitting at a table with his back to the door.
"Hello, Mr. Huebner."
The man didn't turn around.
Kelly looked at the doctor, "your patience, you have ten minutes."
Kelly stood by the door, which was now shut. He checked his watch. The time was 8:10 am.
The white-haired man turned around, half his face looked like a bad wax job. His one good eye squinted at the doctor, he stepped back from the physician but did not get far. A syringe, the size of a cigarette lighter slipped from the sleeve of his white shirt in a flash. He pulled the man called Huebner to himself injected a lethal dose of untraceable poison into the artery in his neck.
Admiral Huebner was dead in sixteen seconds.
Agent Kelly saw what happened. It took his brain a total of three seconds to understand what his eyes told it, and another three seconds for his hand to go to action.
He pulled his gun half an inch out of the holster in his underarm, but that was how far he got. The doctor had been in the move all the time that agent Kelly's brain was busy with its permutations. The doctor hit Kelly once in his temple, and then in the throat.
He then made agent Kelly Ritter's early retirement dream come through by shooting a killer dose of poison in him.
—
1
Slaidburn, Lancashire, England
On Tuesdays, Ken Woodward met Maggie Grove outside Eldridge Abbey in the sprawling meadows of Lancashire. On other days, he worked round the clock at the local museum, where he watched over ancient artifacts from around the country and places of the world.
When Woodward poked his curly blonde hair and his freckled young face through the main door of the Castle of Grove on Monday and asked for Maggie, the old butler knew something was not right. And there was that dark figure of a man who ducked into the hedges when the butler looked over Woodward's shoulder.
"May I see Maggie, please?"
"I wish you could, master Woodward," the butler said piteously, "the lady is out with her friends."
The butler asked the lad if something bothered him. But the boy was off into the road.
Woodward was a nobles son, so was Maggie Grove, but the two families have sworn not to have a thing to do with each other. Perhaps Maggie was tired of him, he thought.
Someone was following him. He had seen the person in the museum, a man tall and rugged in aspect; Woodward went home and locked himself up.
That night he was reading by the light of a lamp when he heard a noise in his living room. Someone had broken in through the window. There were shards of glass on the carpet. A strong hand grabbed him from behind, the tip of a needle pierced the side of his neck and a highly poisonous substance pumped into his veins. He was dead in seconds.
The man went down into the vault in the basement. He pulled the floorboards and found a small wooden case no bigger than a shoebox. Inside it was a gold key. The man picked it and vanished into the night.
The police would find a brooch belonging to lady Maggie beside his stiff body. Their reports would say he had killed himself for love.
Oujda, Morocco.
The first sign of trouble came from Café Bemol, next door. The ti,e was 2:40 pm. The narrow street was roaring back to its usual self, a brio consisting of yammering skinny men in predominantly long white robes advertising their wares on the street corners.
Rauf Abdullah peeped through the white curtains of his window. Below him, a van was pulling into the curb, half it's body hidden under the awning of the pottery shop above which he lived. A bearded man smoked kif in front of the Café Bemol. His blue turban hung loosely from the left side of his extremely wrinkled face.
Rauf heard shouting in the café, a crash followed that. Shortly after this, two men dragged each other by their robes. They rained on each other in Arabic. Rauf watched with amused satisfaction.
Rauf dismissed the kerfuffle, he adjusted his robe around his neck
properly and walked into his small bathroom where he splashed water on his face. His face in the mirror looked unrecognizable.
He checked his teeth. He flossed.
In a foreign city without friends and family, there was little else to do than floss, go down the street to a restaurant where he washed dishes and cleared the tables. It wasn't a great job, but it took care of his rent, even though that was covered just like everything else was by the family's wealth.
His skin had gone from pale to golden brown in two weeks. Since then, he had watched himself go completely tan.
He wore a skull cap, picked his leather bag, and was crossing towards the door of his apartment when he heard the shots. Rauf scuttled around his small table and raffia chair to the window again.
The entrance into Café Bemol was blocked by turbans and white robes, it looked like a hundred human-sized candles with brown wicks out there.
"What the hell…" he murmured.
Rauf looked down at the parked van, the back was open, and a guy in green jumpsuits, The News Reel that was written on his back in red ink, jumped on the curb with two stacks of newspapers.
Ahmed was taking delivery.
Ahmed ran the pottery shop and sold papers alongside; Rauf looked across the street again. The noise had increased. Did someone die in there?
That gunshot. Rauf decided that he would ask Ahmed about it.
But Rauf never got past his door; a man was waiting in the hallway. He wanted to meet with him.
His head jerked around when he heard the knock. It was a light rap, but insistent, successive. Rauf told himself immediately. This wasn't going to end well.
He looked back at the street and saw the crowd was dispersing.
"Min hunak?" he asked in broken Arabic.
The knock again.
Rauf grabbed his leather bag tighter. He pulled his kaftan to his waste, with trembling hands he reached for the cellphone in his pocket. But his hands were shaking so hard that the cellphone fell.
The knock continued at the door.
He hissed, this time in his native tongue, Italian, "chi è lá?"
The knocking stopped, and that was how Rauf Abdullah, real name, Nicolas Ramos, came about his last piece of knowledge on earth.
His end has come.
The poison paused at his heart, so it seemed to afford him a last-minute recount, so to speak, of why he was half a world away from home.
Nicolas Ramos, 32, has been keeping the Templar painting for ten years now. And he has been on the run for almost that long too. In Morocco, he hoped to be safe from the people whom his father said would come for the painting.
"Why are we keeping it, father?" he had asked the withering man on his death bed.
His father had held his hand and, with his last strength, said, "we don't always have a reason for everything we do, Nicolas, just obey."
The question of why had tugged at his soul. Nights of confused meditations, days of fearful anxiety, and finally, the streets of Rome had almost broken his sanity. So he left, he headed Eastward and never stopped till he caught sight of the blue waters of North Atlantic ocean, then the butting rock of Gibraltar. From there, he looked west and entered Morocco.
As his body died and his limbs go numb, he heard the movements of the man search the small apartment. He came to him, his face blurry, his breath smelled of garlic and roasted meat.
"Your friend down there, Ahmed, who sells pots, he said you always carry a bag," the flat voice whispered, "like your life was wrapped in the leather, hanging by the straps around your body. His exact words."
Nicolas blinked. He managed a painful smile; his throat croaked indistinctly.
"Yeah, no words today. Today I make your nightmare come through."
The figure disappeared from his increasingly gray line of sight. It came back with his leather bag, he knew it was it, by its sweaty smell, and its shape. He had hidden it in the ceiling where he hid his money, his passports, and scrapbook.
"And here we are," the voice jeered.
Nicolas heard the dry sound the bag made as the man tore the flap off it. It was too much to bear, the loss, that was. The last drop of will in him broke, and he sucked his last breath, he never exhaled it.
I have failed you, father.
—
Sûreté Nationale, the Moroccan police authority, descended on the apartment the next evening. Ahmed called them.
Ahmed had come stomping up the wooden steps to check on his friend.
Rauf didn't show up at his job the day before. The management of the restaurant had called Ahmed when they didn't see the lad because he was Rauf's guarantor.
The police found a signet ring with the symbol of the Vatican cross on it.
Miami, Florida.
Olivia Newton drove her Corvette on the sidewalk to avoid a light pole that had fallen in the middle of the road. She turned around on East crescent and came back around 73rd Avenue. Olivia punched-joined a small traffic jam there. A tow truck had broken down by the traffic lights, but she could not see why the world had to wait. Up ahead, the road seemed clear.
She punched her horns. Soon, the world was filled with the sound of honking.
Her phone started ringing in her bag as she sped up Douglas road on Southwest 37th avenue.
"Hello," she answered without taking her eyes off the road.
"Olivia, you better get down here fast."
"Tom? What's going on?"
"Are you on the road?" sheriff Tom Garcia asked.
"Yeah, I'm late for an interview in Edgewater Drive, what's up?"
Tom took a moment to speak again, "Gabriel Capaldi is dead."
"What!"
Olivia Newton threw the car around.
Tom Garcia was waiting beside his car when Olivia came speeding into the driveway. She hit up pebbles as she parked two yards from an ambulance. Cops patrolled the grounds, on the steps detectives compared notes. The door to the mansion was open, more cops walked around in there.
Tom Garcia joined her.
"His driver found him this morning," Tom said as they walked up the steps into the house.
They went through a hallway with archways and baroque pillars, paintings on the wall. At the end of the hall, they came out in a courtyard. The roof was glass, and the blue sky was visible.
Below that was the pool. Gabriel Capaldi was floating face down in it. The turquoise water glistened in the sunlight streaming in from the roof, unaware of death floating on it.
Olivia had breaststroke five laps in this water just two weeks before. It had been playful dare from the artist. Five laps for an interview for her column, an exclusive.
It had led to two dinners with Gabriel Capaldi, which she enjoyed very much.
And then she had been here last night. She felt cold sweat beads on her forehead as she took photos.
Seeing the pale skin of the man in the water now, in white shorts, bobbing gently along the middle of the pool, she was overcome with grief.
Tom called the medics after Olivia had taken photos. She asked what the initial conclusion was.
She stared at the body as they took it away.
"I was here last night, Tom," she said softly, eyes on Tom's face.
The sheriff gazed at Olivia for a moment, he said, "We checked the whole house, we had to rule out theft, you know, maybe he wouldn't give up cash, but it wasn't likely."
They walked by the living room where she had drunk wine with Capaldi last night. The bottle of wine and two glasses sat on the table there, insensate.
My prints are on those, she thought, they're all over this place.
They came into the gallery. Very spacious, the gallery had white walls, four pillars created a partition. Harsh white lights shone from fluorescent lamps. Paintings hung on the walls.
One was missing its canvas. It had been cut clean of the frame, bits of stringy canvas still attached to the corners.
Tom Garcia stopped in front of it.
"We think th
is painting was taken, right after he died. That's conjecture though, you know, it could be an accident. We have to wait for the autopsy."
"Wait, I gotta check something,"
Olivia opened her bag and brought out her camera. It was those new ones with screens and some digital capacity. She rolled through the array of old photos and stopped at one. She showed it to Tom Garcia.
"He let me take this photo of the painting, he said it was something like a family heirloom, came down from his great grandfather."
Tom took the camera, he looked from that photo to the empty canvas. He sighed and said he'd have the detective in charge come to see the photo.
Back outside, the crowd of police had lessened and was more organized. A bearded guy with large eyes behind red-rimmed glasses came up the stairs to meet Tom Garcia. The guy wore a light blue trench coat.
"Olivia, this is detective Alex Beatty, he'd be handling this case."
Beatty said, good morning to Olivia. His hands remained tucked in the pockets of trousers.
"Why don't you show him the photo, Olivia?"
"Of course."
"What is this?"
"A painting, goddamn it," the sheriff answered impatiently, "get back in there and check it out for prints and stuff, the works!"
Tom asked Olivia to leave the camera with Beatty for a moment. Beatty charged into the mansion with Olivia's camera.
They sat in the sheriff's car. Tom Garcia rubbed his hair, tiny drops of moisture sprinkled the collar of his uniform as he did. The sheriff's face looked like someone took sandpaper to it in the night. It was leathery.
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