Templar 09 - Secret of the Templars (20 page)

Dubois, Holliday and Lazarus sat under an umbrella on the outdoor patio of the Anchor Café, enjoying their Cinzano and lime drinks and their view of the sea. Lunch had already been eaten and their empty plates removed.

“Neil had been working in this part of the world ever since the CIA caught him with his hand in the cookie jar,” said Dubois.

“What cookie jar was that?” Holliday asked.

“More than half of the covert operations carried out by the CIA in Afghanistan were paid for by smuggled opium shipments. He started cutting himself into the business on the side. The DC-3 he managed to get you here in used to make regular flights out of Afghanistan, down through Burma to the Golden Triangle, where it was shipped abroad, and made its way to
Marseille, back in the old French Connection days. I've known about him for years.”

“And the rest of it?” Holliday asked.

Dubois replied, “We'd been investigating my boss, François Picard, on an ordinary corruption charge, which involved tapping his telephone and that of his mistress. Through the tap on his mistress's telephone, we discovered his connection with Neil's people and also with his mysterious assortment of people involved in the smuggling of arts and artifacts. That, in turn, led us to Picard's connection with Cardinal Hébert.”

“So you knew about the stolen art at the Vatican?” Holliday asked.

“Not immediately,” answered Dubois. “It actually took me years to put all the pieces together. Your arrival on the scene just complicated things even more. I knew Picard's talk of recovering French property dating back to the Bourbon kings was all a smoke screen for something, but I didn't know quite what it was. When your friend Philpot called me three days ago and asked me to give you all the cooperation I could, I accepted, if for no other reason than to find out where you actually fit into this whole thing.”

“I guess you could call me the Man Who Knew Too Much,” said Holliday, quoting the title from the old Hitchcock movie.

“So are we under arrest or not?” Lazarus asked.

“Of course not,” said Dubois. “To get the cooperation of the police here, it was either I arrest you or they do. I thought it would be better if I was the man taking you in. The Seychelles police will be having a field day with the wreck of the DC-3 anyway.”

“So where is all this taking us?” Lazarus asked.

“If Potsy and Peter here have done their jobs, it should take us to Geneva within the next forty-eight hours.”

*   *   *

Sir Henry Maxim's Mercedes limousine pulled up in front of the Banque Orientale de Genève and stopped. The MI6 official entered the bank and asked to see the manager, Herr Hafner.

Hafner took him personally down to Maxim's large locked room in the basement of the bank and left him there. Twenty minutes later, Maxim reappeared with a small object wrapped in brown paper under his overcoat. He crossed the floor of the bank and stepped outside. The chauffeur was standing beside one of the passenger doors leading to the rear of the car, but there was something wrong. In Geneva he always had the same driver, a man named Henry Poole, who was actually an MI6 operative in the Geneva office. But, as if by
magic, Henry had vanished during Maxim's short sojourn at the bank and had been replaced by another driver. This driver was carrying a small automatic pistol in his gloved hand, which was pointed in the general direction of Maxim's midsection.

“What the bloody hell is going on?” Maxim exclaimed.

Suddenly the quiet backstreet was full of people, all of them rushing in Maxim's direction, all of them carrying pistols. The package was taken out of his hands and Maxim was pushed into the limousine, accompanied by three other men.

David Moorhead, the chief of Interpol in Switzerland, walked across the street, with the package Maxim had brought up from the locked room under his arm. He greeted Dubois, Lazarus and Holliday, who were standing in the doorway of yet another bank. Behind Moorhead, the limousine sped off and the street cleared.

“Well done, Peter. We'd almost written you off when you disappeared the way you did.”

“What's in the package?” asked Lazarus.

Moorhead carefully stripped off the paper wrapping. The subject matter of the little painting was immediately obvious. It was a study for Vermeer's famous
Girl with a Pearl Earring
.”

“Unbelievable,” said Moorhead. “He would have made millions.”

“Who owned it?” asked Holliday.

“I have no idea,” said Moorhead. “This must be one of the lost Vermeers. Maxim could have put this on the market using a proxy and he would have gotten away with it, since there is no possible way he could have a provenance.”

“What I can't understand is what a man like Maxim could possibly need, especially with all the money he's made over the years. He's an old man. What more could he want out of his life now? As a high-ranking civil servant in the public eye, he couldn't buy yachts or emerald necklaces or country houses or anything of immense value.”

“I suppose for some people enough is never enough,” said Lazarus.

Holliday and Lazarus walked back to their hotel and went up their suite. Philpot was already there. Somehow he'd managed to get a couple of Big Macs and supersized fries into the room and he was eating heartily as they came in the door. He put down his half-eaten burger, wiped his lips with a napkin and grinned.

“I heard it all went well,” said Potsy.

“Couldn't have gone better,” said Holliday, dropping down into a chair across from his old friend.

Potsy chewed his way through a few fries and
shook his head. “Boy, you sure know how to kick up a shitstorm. You've got every intelligence agency from one end of the world to the other falling all over themselves to get to you. I suppose it's your magnetic personality.”

“The shitstorm isn't quite over,” said Holliday. “One last piece to fit into the puzzle.”

“You mean this goddamn scroll everybody's fighting over?”

“That's the one,” said Holliday.

Philpot went back to his burger and finished it off. He wiped his mouth and leaned back on the couch.

“One thing really confuses me. When you called me from that hotel in Mumbai, you still had the scroll with you. You even told me you still had it and that you'd carried it all the way through Pakistan without anybody finding it. It sure as hell wasn't in your luggage on the Air France flight from the Seychelles. I know that because I checked. So answer me the Sixty-Thousand-Dollar Question. Where is the scroll?”

“I'd like to know the answer to that one too,” said Lazarus.

Holliday smiled. “You remember when we were being picked up by Neil in front of the hotel?”

“Sure,” said Lazarus. “You sent me outside to
make sure we didn't miss him while you paid the bill.”

“That's right,” said Holliday. “I paid the bill and then I mailed a package with the scroll in it to myself. I mean, if you can't trust the post, who can you trust?”

“Where did you mail it to?” Potsy asked.

“Where it all began,” said Holliday.

*   *   *

Holliday and Lazarus sat in the kitchen of Holliday's small apartment in Old Jerusalem drinking a coffee. Holliday's apartment wasn't far from where Peggy and Rafi had set up housekeeping so long ago.

“We've come a long way, you and I,” said Holliday. “I wouldn't hold it against you for a minute if you wanted to bail out now.”

“Not a chance,” said Lazarus. “I want to see how this whole thing turns out.”

The two men drove through Old Jerusalem and up toward the Mount Herzl Cemetery high above the city. Before they got out of the car Holliday handed Lazarus the package containing the scroll.

“If anything goes wrong, you take this straight to the director of the Israel Museum. His name is James Snyder.”

“You sure you don't want me to go up there with you?”

“It would screw things up. You wait here. I have to do this part on my own.”

Holliday got out of the car and climbed up the hillside. In some ways the cemetery reminded him of the one in Arlington. A lot of his friends had been buried there, friends he still missed. He finally reached the spot he was looking for, two stones side by side, the names and dates inscribed in both English and Hebrew. This was Peggy and Rafi's home now, a warm hillside in Jerusalem with the smell of orange trees sweetening the hot dry air.

How many people had died because of the scrawled notation that a Templar Knight had left in a cave over two thousand years ago?

Staring at Rafi and Peggy's graves, Holliday could feel history unrolling in front of his eyes. There was no way to tell what that simple scratching in the stone had launched. A bullet spinning its way through a hundred wars and ten thousand battles. For a moment Holliday felt a lurching feeling in his chest. Then, bending down, he picked up two small pebbles and placed one on the top of each gravestone in front of him in the Jewish tradition.

“I came back to see you,” Holliday whispered. “I came back to tell you how sorry I was.”

*   *   *

Eight hundred yards away Geronimo Caserio stared through the high-powered sight of the .50 caliber sniper rifle, waiting for a perfect shot. The bullets he was using were mercury filled and capable of blowing a man's head off from twice the range there was between him and his target. Caserio looked away from the scope for a second, checking on the leaves on the trees around him. He put his eye back to the sight and slowly adjusted the knob on its top surface.

“You've got maybe three seconds,” said Philpot's voice in Holliday's ear. “He's eight hundred yards northwest of you. When I say duck, fall to the left. Remember that—fall to the
left
.”

Above him Geronimo's finger squeezed on the trigger.

“Now!” said Philpot in Holliday's ear.

Holliday did exactly what he was told. He dropped suddenly to the left, keeping the bulk of his body behind the two headstones. The crack of the bullet from Caserio's shot rebounded through the hills.

The man Philpot had imported from the Ranger
School at Fort Benning, Georgia, watched from two thousand yards away as Caserio opened and then closed the bolt of his rifle, injecting a new round into the chamber.

The Ranger watched as Caserio put his eye to the sight again. He'd heard apocryphal stories about one sniper killing another by shooting him through the reticle of his telescopic sight, but they'd never made any sense to him. Once your bullet had entered the sight, the variables of its movements were impossible to predict. A round could veer in half a dozen directions. And anyway, the Ranger from Fort Benning was the old-fashioned kind. He fired a shot right between Caserio's eyes. It took a little more than two seconds for the high-powered round to cross the valley, and it hit exactly where the Ranger sniper had wanted it to. The P2 assassin's head jerked back and he fell away from the rifle.

Philpot spoke into Holliday's ear one last time. “It's over. You can get up now.”

Holliday climbed to his feet. The circle had now been completed. The man who had killed Peggy and Rafi had been brought to justice. Holliday stared affectionately down at the gray stones, then turned and walked back down the hill.

John Holliday stepped out of his newly purchased town house on Berkeley Square and walked up to Piccadilly, where he flagged down a London black cab.

Holliday climbed into the backseat and settled in. It had been more than a month since he stood at the graves of Peggy and Rafi on Mount Herzl—and a great deal had happened since then. The shitstorm predicted by Moorhead, the Interpol chief, had turned into more of a hurricane.

At the Vatican, Pope Francis had declared that full restitution would be made for all the works of art that had been hidden there for so many years, but it did little good. Discovering who owned what and what compensation would be paid would take years. The Vatican Bank was bankrupt and there were fears that the Church
would be damaged to a point that it would decades to regain its credibility. It was an unholy disaster.

In the art world, the damage was almost just as bad. Dozens of galleries and auction houses were implicated in the whole Operation Leonardo conspiracy and their reputations were as ruined as the Church's.

On the other hand, things had gone rather well for Holliday. The uncovering of the art forgery conspiracy and its connection to the CIA Ghost Squad had earned Holliday not only a Presidential Medal of Freedom, but it had also earned him a presidential pardon for any crimes he might have committed in the past or present. In England, the Queen had given him and Lazarus a formal audience and he was told that he was free to stay in England as long as he wished.

The cab pulled up at the Bond Street address Holliday had given the driver. He paid the cabbie off and climbed out of the vehicle. He looked up at the sign, which read “Lazarus Recovery and Restoration.”

In one of the two bay windows a painting that looked very much like a Rembrandt was displayed on a large easel. In the other window the painting was a medium-sized Turner landscape. He smiled and went inside the small shop. The interior looked
more like a small warehouse rather than a Bond Street gallery. In the rear of the store, there were banks of lights, easels, large worktables. Large, brightly lit magnifiers were neatly arranged as half a dozen men and women in lab coats worked on restoring paintings. In the front of the store, a small greeting area had been arranged with a round table and several comfortable chairs. A coffee service was already laid out and waiting. Lazarus greeted Holliday as he came in the door and gestured to one of the chairs around the table. Lazarus poured coffee and they both sat back in their chairs.

“A lot can happen in a very short space of time,” said Lazarus. “They wanted me to stay on at Interpol, but they only offered me a desk job. I made a deal with them to be a consultant anytime they needed me. The signing bonus helped me to buy this place and a variety of banks did the rest, although I'm now shackled to them for the rest of my life.”

“The banks didn't buy you those paintings in the window,” said Holliday. “Are they fake or real?”

“Quite real,” said Lazarus. “One's from a duke trying to keep his country estate afloat and the other is from a Saudi prince who's quietly selling off his father's collection right from under his
nose. The bulletproof glass is real too. Throw a brick at that stuff and it'll just bounce back and break your nose.”

“That's not why you called me last night.”

“No, it wasn't. A young archaeologist sent me something by courier. He wanted me to give him some idea of what it was. I did as much research as I could and then called him back to tell him what I'd found, which was nothing. But when I called him back, a policeman answered. My young friend had been tortured, murdered and nailed to two boards made into the shape of a cross in his garage. Whoever killed him was looking for information. Then, this morning, an object arrived.”

Lazarus got up and disappeared into the rear area of the shop for a minute. He returned with an object about two feet high wrapped in velvet. Lazarus set the object down on the table and pulled off the velvet drapery. Holliday leaned forward. The object was in the shape of a rough stone obelisk. At the base of each side of the stone was clearly a Templar Cross. What was carved above it was something entirely different. They were undoubtedly ancient occult symbols of one kind or another. Goat-headed men, horned devil figures, pentagrams, upside-down crucifixes and every
other sort of black magic symbol you could imagine.

“Do you know anything about this?” Lazarus asked.

“I'm afraid I do,” Holliday replied. “They were a sect within the movement called the Black Templars. Nobody's heard from them for a thousand
years.”