The Templar Succession

by Mario Reading

  SEVENTY

  The Captain stared at the old man with the rifle. ‘You’ve got to be kidding me.’

  Danko glanced swiftly back at the car. Biljana was sitting in the rear seat, looking out at the unlikely trio, the ghost of a smile hovering about her face. The Captain had spent a great deal of time impressing on her that if she so much as squeaked while they were at the National Park entry post, he would take out the pistol he had tucked into the back of his trousers, under the flap of his Guayabera-style shirt, and kill everybody in the vicinity.

  Biljana had believed him. But there was still a mischievous edge to her that was enjoying his discomfort at this new and unexpected spanner in the works.

  Now she watched the old man who had been allocated as their park guard walking towards the car, with the Captain and Danko following him. One glance at the Captain’s face and she knew that she held the guard’s life in her hands.

  ‘Move over,’ said the Captain in broad Serbian. ‘Granddad is coming to sit beside you. I hope to blazes he doesn’t stink, because if he does, I’m going to kill him just for the hell of it and pitch his body over the nearest cliff. I’ll also kill him if you do anything – anything at all – to make him suspicious of us. Between you and me, I want the bastard to continue breathing. I’d like to be able to drop him off before we get to Chifra, body and rifle intact, so he can go back and dandle his grandchildren on his knee. But I won’t hesitate to fry his liver if you give me any reason, any reason at all, to do so. Do you understand me?’

  All the time he was saying this, the Captain was grinning at Biljana as if he was sharing something nice with her. Recounting the delights of the National Park. Outlining their future plans together.

  Biljana shunted up on the seat and let the old man climb in beside her. He didn’t smell at all. He was dressed in baggy grey trousers over open-toed plastic sandals. He wore a blue shirt under an off-white, four-layered linen gabi, which covered his shoulders and most of his upper body like a cloak. The outfit was topped off with a matching linen turban and a neat pepper-and-salt beard, which was missing only the moustache part. Everything the guard wore was scrupulously clean.

  ‘Hello,’ said Biljana.

  ‘Hello,’ said the old man, touching his forehead in greeting. ‘My name is Gersem.’

  ‘And my name is Biljana. You speak such good English. Where did you learn it?’

  Gersem smiled. ‘In my youth I am guide. Now I am guard. Speak many English. What language you speak with men?’

  ‘Serbian.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Gersem. He shook his head in wonder. ‘I never hear this before.’ He glanced through the car window at the Captain, who had just ordered Danko over to a nearby booth to buy them all a picnic lunch. ‘He your father? He look much like you.’

  Biljana smothered a groan. She was scared for Gersem and scared for herself. She knew all about the Captain’s short fuse. Knew how easily the situation could move from awkward harmony to outright murder. ‘Yes. He is my father,’ she said grudgingly.

  ‘Other man your uncle perhaps?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘He’s a friend of my father.’

  ‘Ethiopia beautiful place,’ said Gersem, settling back in his seat. ‘We see many animals. Oryx. Gazelle. Zebra. Flamingo. Bastard.’

  ‘Bastard?’ said Biljana.

  ‘Big bird. Run very fast.’

  ‘You mean a Bustard?’

  ‘Arabian Bastard. Yes.’

  Biljana just about managed to maintain a straight face. Suppressed anxiety was taking her dangerously close to a fit of the giggles. ‘Why do you have a rifle?’

  Gersem made a shooting motion with his hands. ‘Bad baboon. Big males can attack. Need frighten off. Also tribe. Sometime take hostage. European. American. Hold for ransom. This very bad also. I make see off. No come while I am here.’

  ‘That’s wonderful. Thank you,’ said Biljana.

  ‘Is okay. What I am for,’ said Gersem.

  Danko eased himself into the front of the car and handed Biljana the plastic bag containing their lunch. He glanced at Gersem, then back across to her. He appeared to be trying to communicate something to her with his eyes, but Biljana turned her head away and refused to look at him.

  Gersem started to get out of the car to put the plastic bag in the rear luggage well.

  ‘No. No. Don’t do that,’ said Danko sharply, in English, fearful that Gersem would stumble onto the guns. ‘The boot’s full. You can keep the bag on the seat between you. We’ll stop in a couple of hours and eat it anyway.’

  Biljana smiled at Gersem in an effort to defuse the tension. But it was clear that Gersem had already picked up on the atmosphere between her and Danko. Biljana knew that she must swiftly put on a believable act or she would give herself away. That she must make an attempt to pass off the charged edge in the atmosphere as nothing in particular.

  ‘Thanks, Danko. We’ll do that. I’m looking forward to it. I shall be famished by lunchtime. Mmm.’

  Danko did a slow double-take. Then he looked at the guard. It belatedly dawned on him that Biljana was doing her level best to protect the old man from the Captain.

  ‘Sure,’ he said with a lop-sided grin, pleased that she was connecting with him again, even if only on a nugatory level. ‘Sure. We’ll have a great picnic. This is going to be one hell of a trip.’

  SEVENTY-ONE

  It was Rider who called for the unexpected halt. Sharply, and with an edge to his voice. The Captain had pulled off the main highway. Rider had almost missed the signs. He had lost concentration.

  ‘The bastard can’t be more than half a mile ahead of us,’ Rider hissed, furiously tapping at his computer. ‘If we carry on as we are going, there will be a disaster. Either that or we will have to accelerate past the Renegade, leaving the Captain to bring up our tail.’

  Hart was inured by now to Rider’s fervid taste for melodrama, so he paid scant attention. Once they were stopped, he separated himself from the others and started off up a nearby hill, armed only with a camera and a pair of binoculars. Their guard seemed ready to object, until Amira explained that Hart was a fanatical ornithologist, obsessed by vultures and rock finches, and that if he went everywhere accompanied by an armed man the birds would simply fly away. Such a catastrophe would, Amira assured the man, impact on the scale of tip the guard could expect when they reached the far side of the National Park. The choice was entirely his.

  The guard proved instantly amenable. His English wasn’t good, and his commitment to actually guarding them seemed lukewarm at best. Amira busied herself feeding him sandwiches and sodas from the picnic lunch they had bought back at Gewanē, while Rider sat hunched over his laptop under the shade of a baobab ‘dead rat upside-down’ tree, communicating with the ether.

  With a final backward glance at the guard, Hart eased himself along the crest of the hill, making sure that his silhouette didn’t fracture the skyline. When he saw a giant lobelia, surrounded by half a dozen clumps of ground-hugging shoots, he crawled across to it and sheltered beneath its shade. Once he was certain that no one looking up the hillside below could possibly see him, he brought the binoculars to his eyes and scanned the road.

  Yes, it was just as Rider had suspected. About five hundred yards away from him, and maybe three hundred feet below where he was lying, the Captain’s Renegade was drawn up facing the road. It was parked in a sort of natural lay-by. All four doors were open.

  Hart allowed his binoculars to range to the left and right of the SUV. The first thing Hart saw was the Captain’s Ethiopian guard, sitting cross-legged on a waist-high stone about forty yards from the vehicle. The man was eating a sandwich. His rifle was cradled in the crook of his free arm. He seemed a very different sort of man indeed from the lacklustre guard his own party had inherited. A dozen yards beyond him, the second Serb was sitting on the ground, a few feet from
Biljana. They were eating too.

  Hart spent a long time with his binoculars focused exclusively on Biljana, monitoring her body language and the expression on her face. To his astonishment she seemed entirely at ease with her situation. At one point she called something across to the guard, and they both laughed. Hart felt good about the presence of the guard. While he was around, Biljana would be respected and treated in a halfway civilized manner. His presence offered her a certain degree of security.

  Next, Hart focused his attention on the Serb. The man seemed a few years younger than the Captain. Hart estimated him at not much beyond thirty-five years of age. He had a more open expression than his older companion too – boyish even. An almost man. One glance at the Captain’s face, and you had no doubt whatsoever about his chosen profession. The man was born to be a soldier. Hard-faced. Grim-featured. Implacable. This other man seemed almost tame by comparison. A waiter maybe. Or a garage attendant.

  Despite the apparent dichotomy, Hart noticed that Biljana never looked directly at the second Serb – and neither did they speak. Once or twice, when the man was turned away from her, or had allowed his attention to wander, Hart could see Biljana furtively studying him, as if he were a rare species of moth pinned to a lepidopterist’s table. But the moment he looked towards her again she mimicked losing interest, and turned away.

  Curious.

  When Hart was satisfied that Biljana was unharmed and in good spirits, he searched around for the Captain. But the man was nowhere to be seen. Then, about twenty yards below where he was lying, Hart heard the rattle of a handful of small stones as they pitched and tumbled down the hillside.

  Hart shrank back inside the cover of the giant lobelia shoots. The Captain had clearly had the same idea he had. He was making his way to the top of the hill to get a look back along the road behind him. To gain a perspective. To spy.

  Hart eased himself as deep inside the bower of shoots as he could get. The edges were sharp and unpleasant to the touch, but Hart didn’t care. He just wanted to be invisible. To disappear into the undergrowth.

  When he was buried to the full extent of his body, he twisted round so that his head was pointing back over his right shoulder, its outline disguised by the largest of the shoots. He could see the Captain clearly now. The man was standing in full view, about five yards to the right of where Hart was stretched out. If the Captain turned round for any reason, Hart would be instantly visible.

  As Hart watched, the Captain felt beneath his shirt and brought out a pistol. He stared at it lovingly for a moment. Then he ejected the ammunition clip, popped the clip into his top pocket, and checked the mechanism. Hart could hear the click-click-snick as the Captain tested the slide, followed by the hiss of expelled air as he blew down the barrel to clear it. When he had finished preening, he snapped the ammunition clip back into its original position and tucked the pistol inside his trousers, tight up against his spine. He settled his shirt over the pistol so that it was invisible again, and gave an appreciative grunt.

  Hart looked frantically round for something to defend himself with. Two feet to his right he saw a stone. Maybe three pounds in weight. And small enough to fit into the palm of his hand. Anyone struck with that would know they had been struck. But to reach out and get it would be to reveal most of one arm. If the Captain turned and saw him, he would be for it.

  Hart didn’t have a great many other options. He was lying prone, and in an awkward position. It would take him all of three seconds to get to his feet and into action. By that time the Captain would have drawn his pistol and shot him. And there was a fair chance from up here that no one would hear the shot. The Captain could conceal Hart’s body beneath the giant lobelia, where it would moulder quietly away and eventually be eaten by termites, or a passing lynx. Either that, or he would take advantage of Hart’s fortuitous absence from the race to sneak up on Amira and Rider and clear the decks of them too. If he hid their bodies as well, he and his sidekick could probably make it as far as the Eritrean border before anyone thought to raise the alarm. Cross-border cooperation between Eritrea and Ethiopia was non-existent. The Eritreans would probably applaud.

  Pre-crisis adrenalin surged through Hart’s body. He didn’t doubt for a moment that the Captain was capable of murdering them all. And the sheer size of the park played directly into his hands. The roads until now had been remarkably clear of vehicles. Tourism to the park was minimal. And as far as the indigenous population was concerned, all they’d come across so far had been one Ethiopian road gang led by the usual, near ubiquitous, Chinese gang boss. The place was a murderer’s paradise.

  As Hart watched, the Captain raised his arms, elbows extended.

  So he was using binoculars too? Hart couldn’t quite see to make sure. Either way, the Captain’s full attention seemed focused on the group below him. Hart would never have a better chance.

  He rolled out from under the lobelia in one fluid movement, picking up the three-pound stone as he did so.

  The Captain turned towards him, his mouth part open, his binoculars at half mast.

  Hart launched the stone full force at the Captain’s head.

  The Captain twisted away from the incoming missile. He threw up one arm to defend himself. The stone missed his hand and caught him on the rear side of the skull, near to the occipital bone, just a fraction to the right of the spinal canal.

  The Captain pitched forwards onto his knees.

  Hart kicked him between the shoulders, and then once again, as the Captain instinctively curled into a ball, catching him a glancing blow on the right flank. As the Captain crumpled in front of him, Hart dropped to one knee and snatched the pistol that was now clearly visible inside the Captain’s belt.

  Hart stood up. He aimed the pistol at the Captain’s head.

  ‘Get up, you bastard. You must be losing your touch. This is the second weapon I’ve taken off you in fifteen years.’

  Hart was only half conscious of a noise below him and somewhere to his left. It was the sound a branch makes when it snaps in the wind.

  Something warm brushed past his head.

  Hart turned towards the direction of the noise, his attention no longer on the Captain.

  The Captain’s Ethiopian guard was shooting at him.

  As Hart watched, the snapping noise came again. Hart threw himself to one side. The bullet sliced a frond off the giant lobelia directly in front of him. The vegetation parted as if it had been split by a machete.

  Hart sprinted down the hill towards his car. There didn’t seem to be a lot else he could do. Stay on the summit, and the Captain’s guard would shoot him. Or, worse than that, the Captain would recover from the blow to his head and force Hart to kill him. And given what the guard must think he had seen, Hart could see himself facing half a lifetime in an Ethiopian jail. That would be the crowning irony, wouldn’t it? A murderer and rapist like the Captain transformed into a victim and posthumously sanctified.

  Hart waded like a spaceman through the scree that littered the downward slope of the hill. When he was somewhere near the bottom he forced himself to slow to a walk. He covered the final few yards to where Rider and Amira were standing in the full knowledge that the Captain’s Ethiopian guard might at any moment appear at the top of the hill and take another pot shot at him with his rifle.

  ‘What was that noise?’ said Amira. ‘It sounded like shots to me.’

  Hart glanced towards their own park guard. The man was finishing his second sandwich and sipping from a bottle of Mirinda Orange. He seemed achingly unconcerned by anything he might have heard from the other side of the valley.

  Hart raised his voice so that the guard would pick up everything that he was saying. ‘It was nothing. Nothing at all. Only another party ahead of us frightening away some baboons. The guard was firing into the air. I saw him through my binoculars.’ Hart glanced nervously up the hillside behind him.
‘Look, you two. I fancy I’ve done something rather stupid. I think I’ve left one of my camera lenses back at the entry post at Gewanē.’ Hart made a face. He wasn’t good at play-acting, but it was either that or giving the game away by hustling everyone into the car without providing a reason. ‘It’s a particularly tricky piece of kit to find. And damned expensive. So I’d rather not lose it. Do you mind if we go back the way we came and see if we can locate it?’

  Hart kept his back to the guard so the man wouldn’t see the expression on his face. To Amira and Rider, it was abundantly clear that something was very wrong. Hart rolled his eyes dramatically to get them to hurry up.

  Amira strode back to the car, calling on the guard to accompany them. Rider packed up the remainder of his kit.

  In a little more than five minutes they were heading smartly in the opposite direction and back down the road they had arrived on.

  ‘Look,’ said Hart. ‘Do you see the road that curls away there? Down to the left? Pull over for a moment so that I can have a quick check inside my bag. It would be stupid to drive all the way to Gewanē and find I had the thing with me all the time.’

  Rider didn’t take much convincing. He pulled off the road and parked five hundred yards along the incline.

  Hart told their guard he could remain in the car. He got out and walked a few yards from the vehicle. He squatted down over his lens bag, and pretended to search inside. He waited for Amira and Rider to join him.

  ‘What the hell’s going on?’ said Amira, when she reached his side. ‘Those were shots, weren’t they? And don’t give me any of that baboon bullshit you foisted on the guard.’