Templar Conspiracy

by Paul Christopher

  “Double mufflers on the engines. Polaris silent running chains and gears,” answered Moonblanket.

  “How long is this going to take?” Holliday asked.

  “On a good day, maybe three minutes,” said the Mohawk. “It’s about a mile and a half all told. Five hundred yards to the island, which is still on the Canadian side, then a little less than a mile to Raquette Point on the U.S. side. The only danger is in the first minute—from here to the island. From the island to Raquette Point it’s Akwesasne land. The Feds can’t touch us.”

  “Don’t they have tribal police?” Peggy asked, her voice blurred by the helmet but still understandable.

  Harry Moonblanket pointed at the silent man sitting directly in front of Holliday. “Meet Chief Brandon Redboots of the Akwesasne Tribal Police.” He laughed, gunned the engine and burst out through the open front of the old boathouse. Without a word Redboots followed them out into the whirling snow.

  The wind roared all around them as they raced across the frozen river channel, the cold steadily leaking through the suit and then Peggy’s ski jacket. Within thirty seconds she was freezing, teeth chattering inside the helmet. Suddenly, out of the corner of her vision she saw a shadow racing beside them, perhaps fifty yards away. She wouldn’t have seen anything if the other snowmobile hadn’t been bright yellow with a pulsing blue-and-red light on a short mast. It was slowly sliding in their direction. In front of her Harry Moonblanket let out a high-pitched yell and then a string of incomprehensible words that Peggy assumed were the Mohawk equivalent of swearing. She turned her head and saw a second blue-and-red light on their right.

  “Who are they?” Peggy asked, yelling into the side of the Mohawk’s helmet.

  “Mounties!” Harry yelled back. “The river’s federal property! Hang on!” The Mohawk twisted the throttle and they surged forward, almost tipping Peggy off the back of the racing machine. The pulsing lights were getting closer. She had a flashing memory of some old movie with a Mountie singing on a horse and knew there’d be no singing cops out here. Directly ahead of them an angled ramp of packed snow appeared.

  Harry hit the ramp at full speed, with Holliday and Redboots right behind them. Trees appeared at the top of the ramp and Peggy realized they were on land once again. Almost immediately Moonblanket throttled back and slowed. A hundred yards farther on in the gully he stopped and let Redboots come up beside him.

  “Old Panthers,” grunted Redboots speaking for the first time, his visored face invisible.

  “What’s he talking about and why have we stopped?” Peggy asked urgently, looking back over her shoulder for the telltale red-and-blue flashing lights. There was nothing but blowing snow. “Where are the Mounties?”

  “This is Cornwall Island,” said Moonblanket, sitting in front of her. “Akwesasne land. The Mounties can’t set foot on the place without asking our permission and Brandon’s not likely to give it under the circumstances.”

  Chuckling, Redboots began to sing in a low, guttural voice: “Teiohonwa:ka ne’ni akhonwe:ia Kon’tatieshon iohnekotatie Wakkawehatie wakkawehatie.”

  “What’s he saying?” Peggy asked.

  “It’s his favorite song about paddling his canoe. He always sings when he beats the Flat Hats.”

  “The Flat Hats?”

  “The Red Jackets, the Mounties,” explained Moonblanket.

  “How did they know we’d be there?” Holliday asked seriously.

  “Billy phoned them up and told them. He’s the tribe’s official confidential informant.”

  “Your nephew?”

  “Sure. The Akwesasne survive on smuggled cigarettes. We even own our own tobacco farms. It’s in the treaty from about two hundred years ago. Sometimes we get some serious criminal types down from Montreal, bikers mostly, try to horn in on our business. Billy informs on them. Makes a few bucks for himself. He goes to university now, so he needs the bread.”

  “He did it on purpose?” Peggy asked.

  “Sure. I told him to. We’re on Z1 Turbos. The Flat Hats use old Panther 440s. If we’d been dragging a pod of smokes they maybe coulda caught us, but not with one passenger each. No contest.”

  “It scared the hell out of me,” said Holliday.

  “Speaking of which,” said Peggy, “can we get to where we’re going to sometime soon? I have to pee.”

  Morrie Adler sat on one of the couches in the Oval Office and waited for the president to calm down. Outside the tall, bulletproof windows it was a winter-wonderland postcard, everything covered in a disguising mantle of snow.

  “I won’t do it!” the president steamed. He’d been a secret smoker until a secret checkup had told him in no uncertain terms that he’d better become a secret quitter, which he had, but the side effects of nicotine withdrawal were secretly making him very testy. It occurred to Morrie that wars could be declared or escalated on the basis of the president’s physical condition. There was no doubt in his mind that Roosevelt would have done better at Potsdam if he’d felt better, and whether people liked to admit it or not the last couple of years of Ronald Reagan’s term, the White House and the country had been run by his staff.

  “They’re plugging a hole,” said Adler. “Nothing more.”

  “They’re not plugging a hole; they’re reading polls,” said the president.

  “Sinclair’s the all-out favorite for the job.” Adler shrugged. “You’ve put off appointing a vice president for too long already, kemo sabe. Make your choice or do what the party wants, but do it fast.”

  “You mean do what that psychopath Kate Sinclair wants,” snorted the president. “From what I hear, she’s been whoring herself all over Capitol Hill for two weeks now, kissing asses, gathering in favors and blackmailing what’s left over.”

  “It’s what the country wants, as well,” said Adler. “Ever since you know who was in this office the nation’s been polarized; there is no center line. That’s a tightrope you can’t walk along anymore. The people want guns and butter, give them guns and butter.”

  “I’ll think about it,” said the president.

  “Think fast,” said Adler. “Time’s a-wasting.”

  24

  Bedford Mills, Virginia, was the perfect western Virginia town. Main Street really was called Main Street, the churches all had snow-white steeples and the redbrick courthouse in the middle of town had a white cupola and a bell that was once used to call out the volunteer fire department.

  The population of Bedford Mills was slightly more than five thousand and more than two-thirds of the adult males owned rifles. Almost the same percentage owned handguns and half of them owned fly rods for catching trout in the cool, clear streams that fed White Mountain Lake. There were no Hispanic families in Bedford Mills and only a very small percentage of the population was African American. There was one family of Chinese descent, Ross and Katie Wong and their kids, but they were fourth-generation American.

  The biggest employer in the town was Savage Trucks, which custom built water tankers, milk tankers, dump bodies and sanitation trucks. The other major employer was the Wolf Ridge Distillery, which made a variety of specialty liquors, the most popular being Stonewall 12-Year-Old Bourbon. All in all, safe territory for Senator Richard Pierce Sinclair to have a town hall meeting on the coming threat of domestic terrorism in America.

  The town hall itself was located on South Tower Street on the far side of the old Norfolk and Western tracks. It was only a few minutes’ walk from the old Liberty Depot, which was now a family restaurant with cute menu items listed under titles like Main Line, Water Towers and Cabooses.

  Once upon a time the town hall had been home to the Bedford Mills Klavern of the Ku Klux Klan. It was briefly used as a headquarters building by Stonewall Jack-son during the Civil War, and eventually became the local Mason’s Lodge. The Masons faded away in the area, and in its final incarnation it was used as a recreation center by the Knights of Pythias.

  Try as they might the Pythians couldn’t keep up with t
he slow decay of the 150-year-old building and it was finally rescued by the Bedford Mills Historical Society, which bought it for a dollar, then brought it back to its former glory, then handed it over to the town. The ground floor was now the town library while the second-floor stage and auditorium were sometimes used for local theater productions, award presentations by local service clubs and events exactly like the one taking place this evening.

  The original dressing rooms were located behind the stage and had been redecorated from the burlesque era for some unknown reason. There were posters of Fanny Brice everywhere and a couple of Moulin Rouge posters, as well. Each of the three dressing rooms had a small couch, a rotating makeup chair and a wall-to-wall mirror.

  Kate Pierce had chosen the middle of the three rooms and had waited on the couch while Chelsea, the hired movie hair and makeup girl, made her son look even more senatorial than he was. She added salt-and-pepper highlights to his temples and a few age crinkles around the eyes for wisdom, and then helped him insert the gray contact lenses that dignified his washed-out blue eyes.

  As a final touch Sinclair’s mother handed her son a very up-to-date pair of cherry-red half-glasses to pull from his pocket when he was reading something or appearing to, even though at forty-six he still had twenty-twenty vision. When Kate was satisfied with her son’s appearance she gave the hair and makeup girl a hundred dollars and dismissed her.

  “Is all of this really necessary, Mother?”

  “It’s television, dear,” answered the elderly woman. “If Nixon had worn a little pancake that night in Chicago things might have gone very differently.”

  “Local?”

  “Network, cable, bloggers, the New York Times. Fox, looking for blood. The message is beginning to get through, darling, just as I knew it would.”

  “I’m still not sure about this, Mother,” said the senator, a worried expression on his perfectly made-up face. “With the Pope being assassinated and the vice president dying . . . There’s been so much violence, I don’t think I should look as though I’m advocating more.”

  “Not advocating, dear; warning about it. Our borders are like sieves; the economy is in the sewer; the poor, the homeless and the unemployed are at the end of their rope. There’s bound to be a groundswell of grassroots violence that will spread through the country like wildfire unless something is done about it, and quickly.” Since Kate Sinclair wrote her son’s speeches it wasn’t surprising that she could quote from them at length.

  “That’s like asking for martial law. A dictatorship,” argued the senator.

  “We’re not asking for either one. We’re asking for the strong America of the past. Better security. Vigilance. The ability to find our enemies and destroy them before they do the same to us.”

  “How about something like this,” suggested the senator, the timbre of his voice adopting its senatorial edge. “Guantánamo was a failure because we didn’t annex the whole damn island during the Spanish-American War and Kennedy didn’t have the courage to invade properly at the Bay of Pigs in ’sixty-one. As for the Japanese, it’s been almost seventy years since Pearl Harbor. It’s ancient history and so are the internment camps. If a reporter or anyone else asks about places like Manzanar, we counter with Changi in Singapore.”

  “Excellent.” Kate Sinclair beamed.

  “When is it scheduled to happen?” the senator asked.

  “Better if you don’t know exactly, dear. It will seem more natural.”

  “He knows what to do?”

  “He’s the best,” assured the senator’s mother.

  “And when it happens?”

  “Act the part,” said Kate Sinclair. “Sic semper tyrannis but with a happy ending.”

  The auditorium had seating for a 180 people and standing room under the balcony for 60 more. The balcony itself had long ago by default turned into a storage area for old props and costumes, since the hall was rarely used for theatrical productions now that the Mountain View Cinema had closed down and was the home of the Bedford Little Theater.

  Tonight the auditorium was packed, mostly with locals but also with reporters and cameramen from all the national networks and newspapers. In the time since the assassination of the Pope and the death of the vice president, Senator Richard Pierce Sinclair had gone from being an obscure albeit handsome junior senator with a strident message that almost never made the news to a pundit on CNN when it came to issues of terrorism. He was a regular guest on everything from Meet the Press to Glenn Beck’s TV and radio shows, and “author” of an upcoming book titled American Terror, which had already been accepted for publication by Regnery Publishing, the foremost conservative publisher in the nation.

  Tonight was Senator Sinclair’s eighth town hall meeting, and the most heavily attended by the national press. When he was interviewed the week before on Larry King Live, the comment was made that in recent days it seemed as though the senator was campaigning for president. His reply was a nice, gap-toothed smile and the perfectly scripted response: “Not this year, Larry. Being a senator is enough for any American.”

  As usual, security at the meeting was provided by the Blackhawk Security, a subsidiary of Kate Sinclair’s main corporation, the modern version of the original Crusader Pipe and Tile Corporation, now generally known as IPT International. There was a pair of armed guards at each of the four exits, and a metal detector and a wand-carrying guard at the main entrance. There were four more guards close to the stage and two out in the parking lot.

  The guards were dressed like Secret Service agents, complete with lapel pins and wrist microphones. This was no coincidence; Kate Sinclair was well aware that presentation was everything these days and the Secret Service- style guards were nothing more than an extension of the makeup that Jack Kennedy used—and Richard Nixon didn’t—during the debate in 1960.

  Senator Sinclair appeared on stage at eight fifteen p.m., exactly on time. He looked composed, with a slight touch of the humble in his demeanor. Tonight, given the small-town, essentially rural audience, he was wearing old lace-up shoes, well-worn blue jeans and a brown sports jacket over an open-necked, plain white shirt. His Yale ring was missing, and his usual Rolex President had been replaced by a Timex Indiglo.

  The ruddiness and color of his cheeks, given to him by Chelsea the makeup girl, lent him the appearance of a man who spent a great deal of time outdoors. Educated at places like Exeter and Yale, the senator had long since lost any trace of his native Virginia accent, but like any good politician he was able to affect the twangy drawl of his youth any time he wanted—the help of a speech coach his mother hired for him every summer didn’t hurt.

  As usual Senator Sinclair’s opening remarks took the form of a canned speech he’d given dozens of times before about the threat of domestic terrorism. It was peppered with sound bites for the networks, and while it never mentioned American-born Muslims as the generators of such terrorism the speech inevitably mentioned that there were “as many as” five million Muslims in the United States, which provided a “rich environment” for extreme political views. The overall feeling was that the Muslim community was growing by leaps and bounds and would soon surpass Christianity’s slim numerical majority in the world unless something was done, and done soon.

  The inference was clear, even if only subliminally stated: America was a Christian nation. The currency said it, the Pledge of Allegiance said it, the Constitution of the United States said it, and so did the Declaration of Independence. It was an old and very American principal: he who is not my friend is by definition my enemy.

  At exactly eight thirty, as applause and cheers echoed around the auditorium, every camera in the room was either in tight close-up of the senator as he appeared on the stage, looking slightly embarrassed by the adulation of his audience, or wide on a shot of the enthusiastic crowd as it clambered to its feet in a standing ovation. Senator Sinclair moved to center stage and stood in front of a simple lectern to give his speech.

  Accordi
ng to the time code on the endlessly analyzed raw CNN tape it was 8:31:30:09 when someone on the far right side of the second row drew an odd-looking handgun from beneath his jacket and screamed out something in Arabic just before he fired. The man’s voice was loud and clear in the high-ceilinged old hall.

  “Bismillâh ir-rahmân ir-rahîm! allâhu akbar! lâ ilâha illâ-llâh!”

  It took CNN in Atlanta barely five minutes to have the phrase translated: “For the glory of Allah, most merciful and most compassionate! Allah is great! Allah is the one true god!” According to the translator the dialect was either Egyptian or Syrian.

  Completely vulnerable behind the simple lectern, the stricken Senator Sinclair spun around and crumpled to the floor. The gunman, still screaming, ran toward the fire exit on the right-hand side of the stage. A total of six Blackhawk security guards fired at the man independently, striking him eleven times in the head, neck and chest. He was dead long before he reached the floor, bone, blood and brains spattering in every direction.

  Two hundred and thirty-two people in the auditorium ran for the stairs and the emergency exits. The first person to reach the fallen senator was his mother, who had been watching from the wings.

  She fell to her knees and gathered her only son into her arms. The CNN cameraman who was one of the very few who had remained in position caught the shot perfectly. So did a local freelance photographer named Patrick Henry Jefferson, who worked mostly, but not exclusively, for the Bedford Mills Bulletin, and who shot the scene from a slightly but crucially different angle that caught the scarlet blossom of blood on the senator’s snow-white shirtfront and the perfect look of maternal shock and anguish on Kate Sinclair’s aging, handsome, aristocratic face.

  Within three minutes of the shooting a tape was uploaded onto YouTube and a tweet went out on Twitter purportedly from the group Jihad al-Salibiyya taking credit for the attack on the senator and telling the world that after striking abroad they were now bringing the fight and the cause to America.