The Templar conspiracy t-4

by Paul Christopher

  5

  "Philpot's a lot of things but he's no actor," said Holliday tensely, passing on yet another cup of coffee and sitting down at the kitchen table. "He just tried too damned hard. He was looking around like one of the villains in a Pink Panther movie. What he didn't try very hard to do was to keep back information. I barely put any pressure on him. He confirmed William Tritt as the most likely suspect and had his most recent travel itinerary memorized. Five will get you ten he was wearing a wire or we were being watched from the parking lot." Holliday sighed and shook his head. "The whole thing was far too easy. I asked him for some background files and he even had a dead drop organized and ready to go."

  "Sounds like the lads are trying to distance themselves from this Tritt fellow," commented Brennan.

  "And awfully eager to put it on the Muslims," said Holliday.

  "We Americans always think of our enemies storming the gates," said Peggy thoughtfully. "It's easy to worry about someone named Ali Sayyid Muhamed Mustafa al-Bakri, but worrying about someone named Bill Tritt, who sounds like a guy who works in the plumbing section of Home Depot, is a lot harder to swallow."

  "An American assassin; good Christ, that'll put the cat among the pigeons," said Brennan.

  Holliday stared blindly up at the ceiling. Something Philpot had said that didn't quite fit. The more he tried to remember, the vaguer the memory got. He looked at Brennan. "I think you were right. There's a whole other level to this thing."

  "So what do we do about it?" Peggy asked.

  "Follow the trail of bread crumbs that Potsy left for us," said Holliday. "We have no other choice and not much time."

  Giving in to the freedom of a fresh divorce, the successful navigation of a midlife crisis and a secret yen to be James Bond after seeing Goldfinger as a young boy at the Neuadd Dwyfor cinema in his hometown of Holyhead, Wales, the professor whom Holliday was replacing for a year had purchased a silver Aston Martin DB9 for his fiftieth birthday. He'd given Holliday free reign to drive the car while he was away, as long as he took it in for monthly tune-ups, paid for its maintenance and took out his own insurance.

  The magnificent twelve-cylinder brute of a car drank gasoline like a man dying of thirst in the desert, but it was worth every drop; Holliday had never had such fun driving a vehicle in his entire life. Both Brennan and Peggy wanted to go along with him to the dead drop in Rock Creek Park, but the car was only a two-seater.

  Peggy cited her superior driving skills while Brennan simply stated that it was a man's job and "no task for a slip of a girl, begging your pardon." In the end Peggy won out after Brennan admitted that it would be extremely difficult for him to last that long without a cigarette, and the one thing stressed by the Aston Martin's owner was a no-smoking rule.

  Before they set out for the park Brennan told Holliday to wait for a moment and went upstairs to the guest room. He returned with a flat-black, short-barreled Beretta Storm semiautomatic, small enough to fit in a jacket pocket, and an extra clip. The bullets were.40-caliber hollow points, fifteen to a clip. A police load.

  "How on earth did you get that through customs?" Holliday said, astounded that the priest had brought a pistol with him in his luggage.

  Brennan gave a very Italian shrug. "I travel on a Vatican diplomatic passport." He smiled sourly. "Anyway, people suspect all priests are pedophiles, not gunrunners."

  "You really think we're going to need that?" Peggy asked.

  "Weapons are like the Garda," said Brennan, referring to the Irish police force. "When you really need them, they're never there."

  Holliday took the pistol, gave it a quick once-over to familiarize himself with it, then tucked it away.

  It was only four in the afternoon when they left Prospect Street for Rock Creek, but it was already almost dark. In an hour or so the park police would be out in force, looking for kids tearing at each other's clothing in the backseats of their parents' cars.

  Peggy drove and Holliday rode shotgun, giving her directions. If there was any trouble, Holliday had given her explicit orders to get the hell away as quickly as she could; if it came down to a chase, there wasn't a cop car outside of Germany that could catch an Aston Martin.

  It was still snowing as Peggy drove the powerful sports car north toward Ridge Road and their destination, the wipers keeping up a steady metronome beat as night fell and the snow turned to slush under their wheels. It was getting warmer and the snowflakes were getting big and soft. If they had another cold snap the streets would be skating rinks and there'd be hell to pay on the morning commute.

  "What good is a dead drop or whatever you call it? Just seems like a lot of trouble to me," said Peggy.

  "Dead drops are used so the parties involved don't have to meet, but in this case I think it's only window dressing to make Potsy's story a little more credible. There's probably nothing to worry about; they want us to have this material."

  "So, how do we do this?" Peggy asked. "I'm not up on my spy-craft techniques."

  "Tradecraft," corrected Holliday. "We just do exactly what Potsy said. Coming in from the north puts the passenger's side closest to the abutment and the pipes that make up the bridge. I get out, with the car blocking the view from the other side of the road. I retrieve the files, get back in the car and off we go."

  Holliday guided Peggy north up Nebraska Avenue to Military Road, then east into the park. The pines and cedars were postcard perfect with their heavy mantles of snow, and as night came a peculiar, muffled quiet settled on the park as though the land was holding its breath just before shimmering out of the present day like some illusion, reverting to the empty, lonely place it had been ten thousand years ago.

  Peggy turned the powerful car due south down Ridge Road. The snow was pristine, almost phosphorescent in the utter darkness, a gleaming white pathway between the dense stands of trees. No one had traveled here in quite a while; not surprising since the average Washingtonian had little experience driving in snow.

  "Spooky," said Peggy.

  "Nervous?" Holliday asked. "I can take the wheel if you want."

  "I'm fine," said Peggy defensively.

  "Just go slow and easy," suggested Holliday. "Put it into the lowest gear you can."

  Peggy blew Holliday an expressive raspberry. "Sure, Granddad. Then you can tell me how you used to walk five miles to school." She dropped the shift lever into the lowest of the six gears and headed even deeper into the park.

  The snow was developing a light crust and the big tires crunched over it, making the silence even more profound. For most of the way the road followed the course of an ancient streambed. The trees here were mostly birch and hickory, their leafless branches stark and skeletal as the Aston Martin's halogen headlights swept across the forest with each turn in the twisting road. Holliday watched the odometer. At half a mile, just as Philpot had said, they rounded a corner and the headlights found the three-pipe bridge. The ground sloped away on both sides and the trees were thinly spread. The crunching sound under the tires was louder now; the temperature was rising. If it fell again before morning the roads here would be a skating rink.

  "There it is," said Holliday.

  "I see it, Doc," said Peggy.

  She slowed the sports car to a crawl and eased over the culvert bridge to the far abutment. There was a graffiti tag that looked as though it said Bad Idea. Below it was a single spray of red. Peggy stopped.

  "Kill the lights," said Holliday. Peggy did so, the only remaining light coming from the faint blue glow of the instrument panel. Holliday eased open the door and kept low as he approached the abutment and the capped ends of the pipes. The middle one unscrewed easily. He'd been expecting a rolled-up bundle of paper, perhaps in a plastic sleeve. What he got was an ordinary mailing-room address tag attached to a USB flash drive.

  He grabbed the tag, pulled out the miniature hard drive, then recapped the pipe. The way the snow was falling his footprints and even the Aston Martin's tire tracks would disappear in the next few
minutes. He slipped back into the car.

  "Mission accomplished," Holliday said.

  "Famous last words," warned Peggy.

  The other vehicle came over the hill in a rush, blinding headlights blazing. Even from the inside of the Aston Martin, both Peggy and Holliday could hear the heavy clatter of tire chains.

  Peggy flipped on the Aston's headlights, briefly illuminating the monster bearing down on them. "Oh, crap," she said. It was a behemoth of an F150 truck with a gleaming, lethal-looking snowplow attached to the front, half raised. If it hit them head-on, the huge pickup truck would either ride up the Aston Martin and crush them or the snowplow blade would slice through the windshield and the roof. Either way they'd be dead.

  Peggy shifted the car into reverse and dropped her foot down on the gas in a long, smooth motion. The Aston Martin raced backward as the F150 came at them, gaining with each second. Peggy suddenly twitched the wheel to the right and simultaneously dragged up on the emergency brake to the left of the driver's seat.

  The big car went into a sliding, perfectly executed bootlegger's turn and stopped. Peggy released the hand brake with one hand and pushed the shift lever into second gear. They were now facing back the way they'd come. She hit the gas again and the car gathered speed until they seemed to be skating over the snow, the rear end of the car fishtailing as they went around every turn. The only things that kept it from plunging off the road and into the woods were its weight and its low center of gravity. Throughout the whole operation neither Peggy nor Holliday said a word, Peggy completely focused on her driving and Holliday doing some quick computations in his head.

  No matter how he figured it, the truck was almost sure to catch up with them before they reached the relative safety of Military Road. The chains on the tires gave the truck better traction, and it had four-wheel drive, sticking it to the snow-covered road like superglue. What was it one of his instructors at Ranger School had told him? "Fight or flight. If you can't take flight, then turn and fight."

  Holliday looked behind them. The F150 was less than a hundred yards away and closing fast. "That turn, can you do it again?" he yelled.

  "Say when!" Peggy answered. Holliday took the Beretta out of his pocket, jacked a round into the chamber and then used his right hand to pull open the door latch.

  "Now!"

  Again Peggy went through the moves for a bootlegger's turn, ending up facing the oncoming truck. Holliday threw open the door and flung himself out onto the snow-covered road. He gripped the gun in both hands, leveled the pistol at the upper sill and began to fire, aiming for the windshield, adjusting his aim from left to right.

  At twenty yards the big truck suddenly swerved, tried to climb the incline to the left, then dropped backward in a spin that took it over the drop on the right, eventually stopping as it struck a stand of three oak trees broadside to the road above. Never one for taking half measures, Holliday dropped out the empty clip into the snow, fumbled around in his pocket for the second clip and rammed it into the butt of the pistol.

  He began firing, squeezing the trigger again and again, trying to concentrate his fire on the driver's-side window. Halfway through the second clip there was a brief flash of sparks from a ricochet toward the center of the chassis. A split second later there was a flash and then a thunderous explosion as the thirty-gallon gas tank exploded, the concussion throwing the truck over on its side and igniting the trees all around it.

  Holliday stuffed the Beretta back into his jacket pocket and climbed into the Aston Martin again, slamming the door behind him. Peggy stared at the blazing truck and the trees turned into torches, her eyes wide and horrified.

  "There were people in that thing," said Peggy, a ghastly look on her face made even more grotesque by the play of the shadows from the flickering flames.

  "Better them than us," said Holliday, his voice cold. "Drive."

  She dropped the Aston Martin into gear, then eased the car into a narrow turn and headed north toward Military Drive. Behind them the fiery truck faded into darkness. In the far distance they could hear the first sounds of approaching sirens. Holliday reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and took out his cell phone. He punched in the number for the Prospect Street house. On the sixth ring Brennan answered hesitantly.

  "Yes?"

  "It's Holliday. Get out of there now; the house has been compromised. No packing, no nothing-just go." He paused for a second. "On second thought, bring my laptop. It's in a case in the study. Make it fast. You probably don't have more than a few minutes. Don't wear your collar, nothing that identifies you as a priest. Walk down to M Street and get a cab. Tell the driver to get to the Capital Hilton on Sixteenth. It's a couple of blocks from the White House. We'll be registered under the name of Dr. Henry Granger."

  "I don't understand…" began Brennan.

  "I'll explain later. Go. Now." He snapped the phone closed. For the rest of the drive into the city they traveled in silence, lost in their own thoughts.

  6

  "Why here?" Peggy asked as they crossed the discreet and dignified lobby of the Capital Hilton. The lobby was all low lighting and mahogany. It looked like the reception area of a high-priced law firm. Quiet was the order of the day.

  "The valet parks the Aston Martin in a garage somewhere nearby, which gets it off the street for the moment, and we have a place where we can lay our weary heads while we figure out what to do next."

  "Why did you tell Brennan the Prospect Street house had been compromised?"

  "Because it almost certainly has been," said Holliday. "We know it wasn't Potsy's people who came after us, ergo it has to be someone who knows what he knows, and which also means they almost surely know where we live. It's got to be Sinclair's people."

  "Why couldn't it have been this Potsy friend of yours?"

  "Why go to all the trouble?" Holliday said. "Why put a memory stick in the pipe if the dead drop was just bait? Why go through the charade at McDonald's?" He shook his head. "It wasn't Potsy's people, so it probably wasn't one of the other alphabet agencies either: CIA, NSA, DIA. Someone who wants to put us down because we know too much about the assassination that they want to keep to themselves. If the killer really was this William Tritt guy and he's on Sinclair's payroll, then she'd go to any lengths to keep it quiet. Rex Deus would be haunted by it for decades. They have to keep up this terrorist front."

  They reached the long reservation counter and a pleasant lady with a brass-colored plastic name tag that read ANNE V. booked them into a suite on the sixth floor and then handed Holliday a note. It was from Brennan: In the lounge. It was signed with the scrawled letter B. Anne pointed out a curtained area at the far end of the lobby, and they found Brennan in one of the orange-curtained alcoves across from the bar. He was sipping from a fat glass filled with a rust-colored drink that was too dark for Irish whiskey and too light to be Bourbon.

  "I must admit a certain fondness for Canadian rye," said the priest as Holliday and Peggy sat down. "It's somehow a little bit uncivilized, like something you'd make in a bathtub." Brennan looked forlorn without the white-notched collar of his profession. His usual ash-flecked black shirt was covered with a ratty green, ash-flecked sweater that had seen better days. "I always imagine grizzled farmers in Saskatchewan wearing bib overalls and sweating over a hot poteen still hidden in their barns."

  A waitress appeared and took their orders. Holliday asked for a Beck's beer and Peggy settled on a Jager Bomb-an Australian monstrosity that consisted of a shot glass of Jagermeister German "digestif" tipped into a larger glass of Red Bull energy drink. The waitress went away to fetch their orders, and they got down to business.

  Holliday filled Brennan in about the snowplow attack as the priest worked his way through a second Crown Royal on the rocks.

  "I didn't know you were such a driver," commented Brennan.

  "Me neither." Holliday laughed. "I was hanging on for dear life."

  "I took the photos for an executive protection articl
e for the New York Times Magazine a few years back, so while I was there I took the whole course. That's the first time I ever used what I learned."

  "Well," said Brennan, "we should give thanks that you could use it when you needed it." He lifted his nearly empty glass. "Slainte," he said, pronouncing the ancient Irish toast as "slancha." He put his glass down on the table. "So, now what, Colonel?"

  "We see if there's anything on that memory stick," answered Holliday. "Did you bring the laptop?"

  "Right here," said Brennan, patting the seat beside him.

  "Then let's go."

  The suite was standard upscale Hilton: two generic prints above the beds in each of the bedrooms and everything in muted shades of rust and pink and beige. Tasteful and inoffensive. There was a Wi-Fi connection, a sitting room between the bedrooms and big screen TVs everywhere except the bathrooms. Holliday set up the computer on the little desk in the room and booted it up. He plugged the USB drive into the appropriate port and waited a few seconds for the menu window to open. There were three files on the memory stick: "Tritt," "Sinclair" and "Itinerary."

  All three files were CIA reports from what had clearly been a much larger file under the project name Crusader. From what Holliday could tell, Crusader was a classic arm's-length Delaware company like Evergreen International Airlines and In-Q-Tel, a high-technology dummy corporation whose main function was to monitor traffic carried on telecommunication satellites. According to the file numbers, Crusader had been in operation, although inactive, for two years.

  "If Crusader involves Kate Sinclair, how come it pre-dates that whole episode during the summer-Sable Island and buried relics and all that?" Peggy asked.

  "Sinclair's main objective was to put her son in the White House," said Holliday. "Those phony relics were just a means to an end. I think Crusader might well be her version of Plan B."

  "How does assassinating the Pope accomplish that?" Peggy asked.

  "That's what we have to find out," said Holliday.