Templar 09 - Secret of the Templars (7 page)

The Vatican Administration Building looked like a cross between an old Hilton Hotel, Versailles and a wedding cake. The two priests, each carrying a plain attaché case, climbed a set of wide steps to a broad patio. They crossed the patio until they reached a narrower set of stairs between a pair of columns leading to the ornately decorated front door.

They pulled open one of the large doors and stepped inside the building. It was laid out in a long, wide cross, one passage leading in all four directions of the compass. The place was swarming with people, most of them dressed like the two priests, others in ordinary business suits, and some nuns scuttling about. The two priests with briefcases turned left and moved down the hallway. Reaching the end, they came to a door that read
“VIETATO L'INGRESSO”
—No Admittance.

Ignoring the instruction, the two priests pushed through and found themselves at the far end of the building's south wing. There was a large door, a narrow set of stairs and a freight elevator. They pressed the down button for the elevator, which soon arrived, its large door sliding open. The two men stepped inside, at which point one of them turned and pressed the stop button to keep the elevator from going anywhere.

“We've got about thirty seconds,” said Holliday, stripping off his vestments and leaning down to open the briefcase. He pulled out a brown workman's boiler suit with a papal patch on the chest. He climbed into it, pushed the vestments into the now empty briefcase and closed it up again. When he stood and turned, he discovered that Lazarus had done the same thing.

“The shoes are wrong, but we can live with that,” said Lazarus.

“We'll have to ditch the briefcases as soon as we can. I don't want to go through all of this in reverse on our way out,” Holliday said.

Holliday hit the stop button again and then the down button. The freight elevator lumbered downward and came to a jarring halt. The doors grumbled back and the two men stepped out. They faced a broad corridor between heavy pipes,
boilers, generators and all the other machinery necessary for running a large building.

Interestingly, there were two narrow-gauge rails set into the concrete of the floor, like the railroads used in old coal and tin mines. They ran off into the distance without a break. Holliday and Lazarus found a dark space at the foot of one of the boilers and shoved their briefcases out of sight.

“I guess we should follow the yellow brick road,” said Lazarus, nodding down at the rails on the floor.

“Well, we sure as shit aren't in Kansas anymore.” Holliday laughed.

Freed of their priestly burden, the two men walked down the main passageway surrounded by the sounds of machinery.

Both the priests' vestments and the papal boiler suits had been easy enough to come by. They had all been purchased at Barbiconi, a religious department store only a few blocks from the Vatican.

The two men walked past half a dozen or so similarly dressed workers, who ignored them completely. Holliday saw a clipboard resting on a set of valves and scooped it up; there was nothing like a clipboard to make you look official. They finally
reached the end of the broad alleyway and came to a stop in front of yet another door marked “No Admittance.” They ignored the warning once again and stepped through the door.

This time they could quickly see that they were out of place. A small room on the left with windows on three sides contained several banks of closed-circuit TV monitors. At the far end of the passageway was an area guarded by what looked like steel bars. The railway tracks went under the steel bars and ran farther on. A security guard sat in a folding chair eating a Quarter Pounder with bacon and cheese and a supersized bag of fries. A giant paper cup stood at his feet. He had neatly made a bib out of a paper napkin and that had only marginally succeeded. There was food in a Niagara of special sauce, ketchup and bacon bits spilling over his large belly.

“Ventilatore,”
said Holliday, waving the clipboard vaguely in the direction of the area behind the bars and stretching his Italian vocabulary to the absolute maximum. The guard grunted something with his mouth full toward the television monitor room. There was a clanging noise and the gates popped open. Holliday and Lazarus stepped through the barred gate into what appeared to be the outer chamber of a bank vault. Walls of safety-deposit boxes rose to the ceiling
on either wall and directly in front of them were two massive doors, each fitted with a large combination lock. Holliday waved his clipboard at the single large vent in the ceiling and Lazarus nodded in agreement. In fact, both men were focused on the two massive doors and their large locks. The doors had the scrolling escutcheon of Chubb & Sons. Each of the doors had its own turning wheel and combination dial. It looked as though it had been made sometime in the 1920s.

“How the hell are we expected to get into that?” whispered Lazarus.

“I don't have the slightest idea. I guess we should ask your friend Saxon Peck.”

Holliday and Lazarus made their way back down the basement hallway, got into the elevator and made their way out, walking past a tall gray-haired man in what appeared to be an extremely expensive suit. Accompanying him were two tall, burly priests who looked more like bodyguards than clerics. Lazarus frowned as they passed.

“Something wrong?” Holliday asked.

“Yes, but I can't quite put my finger on it,” Lazarus said.

They eventually made their way to Saint Peter's Square and crossed it, heading back to the antiquarian bookstore.

“Shit!” Lazarus said. “Now I know what was bugging me.”

“What was it? Something to do with those two bully boys we passed in the corridor back there?”

“Yes, and the man they were guarding—Eric Bingham. He owns the biggest auction gallery in Palm Beach and he's run more than one scam in the art world. What the hell is he doing here?”

“What kind of scams?” Holliday asked.

“A painting would be sold in a New York auction to a telephone bidder. The telephone bidder would then put the painting on permanent loan to a fictitious municipal gallery in the Midwest. Meanwhile, the painting would be sold under a different name to a different Midwestern gallery. And then it would be sent to the Miami branch of the Bingham Gallery, where it would actually be sold. A large and prominent art expert in New York would give bona fides to all the versions of the paintings. That way the two ‘owners' of the painting got substantial tax write-offs. All the paperwork was handled by the Bingham Gallery in Palm Beach. He escaped prosecution by going to the FBI and providing evidence for the criminal prosecution of several major smugglers of art, ancient artifacts and stolen jewelry. He has been a good boy ever since, but seeing him here doesn't make me trust that he's a good boy now.”

“Can you see any way the Vatican could be involved with a man like this?” Holliday asked.

“The paintings and other fine art brought to the Vatican on Huff's train and the fact that the Vatican Bank has been involved in several serious scandals lately might have something to do with it, but I can't see what exactly.”

“Let's get back to Peck's as quickly as possible and see if we can think this out.”

*   *   *

Holliday, Lazarus and Peck sat around the round table at the rear of the old man's store. The table was littered with espresso cups, whiskey tumblers and a three-quarters-empty bottle of Glenlivet. After an hour of discussion, they had decided several things. Number one, the big old Chubb safe would be impossible to open by two amateurs under so much security. Number two, hiring a proper cracksman was too dangerous from a secrecy point of view. The only possible way to discover what was going on was by keeping track of what Bingham was up to—following him was going to be a lot safer than breaking into the safes.

“Well, I can tell you one thing about Bingham: he never goes second-class. And that means we'll find him in the most expensive hotel in Rome.”

“That would be the Hotel de Russie on Via del Babuino,” said Peck. “These days it's considered to be the place where the Hollywood A-list goes.”

It took two phone calls to confirm that Bingham was in residence there.

“Now what do we do?” Holliday asked.

“Pay him a visit, I suppose,” replied Lazarus.

*   *   *

Rusty Smart sat in the Fort Myer Drive safe house control room, a satellite phone to his ear.

“Were our suspicions correct?” he asked.

“He went to the Vatican and came out empty-handed,” said Tom Harris, the leader of the group, who had been sent to keep track of Holliday and Lazarus's movements.

“Where is Bingham now?” Smart asked.

“He's in the Hotel de Russie but he's scheduled to be on a train to Paris by ten o'clock tomorrow morning. He'll arrive at eleven thirty the following day and will take the morning Chunnel train to London.”

“I want you to get somone to fly to Paris and another person to fly to London to meet both trains. Harris, you'll follow him directly from Rome.”

“Okay, boss, but what do we do about Holliday?”

“Somehow I have a suspicion that Holliday isn't going to be too far away from any of this, so keep your eyes open.”

Smart turned off the encrypted satellite phone and idly watched the screens in the control room. Something was wrong. He could smell it from a mile away. If he wasn't absolutely careful, the whole damn project would come crashing down and more than likely take the entire CIA with it.

*   *   *

Holliday and Lazarus stood in the plain but luxurious lobby of the Hotel de Russie. Holliday stood by one of the house phones while Lazarus stood at the reservation desk talking to the man behind the counter. Holliday checked his watch, then dialed the number of the hotel. He could see the man picking up the phone behind the reception desk as Lazarus removed a rather cumbersome cell phone from his jacket pocket and flipped it open below the eye level of the receptionist. Simultaneously the man at reception connected with Holliday.

“Hotel de Russie,” said the receptionist politely.

“I'd like to speak with Mr. Bingham. Is he in?” Holliday asked.

“I'll ring,” replied the receptionist. The call went through with the strange triple ring of most Italian telephones and by the fifth ring it was clear that nobody was going to answer.

“I'm afraid he doesn't seem to be in,” said the receptionist.

“Perhaps I'll call him again later,” said Holliday.

Lazarus and Holliday meandered into the Stravinskij Bar and both of them ordered mineral water.

“Did it work?” Holliday asked.

“Like clockwork,” said Lazarus, taking the phone from his jacket pocket and looking at the small screen. The device was called a phone cloner. By standing close enough to a phone the cloning device could then “steal” the other phone's signal. “Bingham is in a penthouse suite. Room 509.”

“Excellent,” said Holliday. “Let's go see what Bingham and his two thugs took out of the Vatican.”

“Won't that be illegal?” Lazarus said with a wink.

“Frankly, I couldn't give a shit.”

The hallway on the fifth floor of the hotel was empty. Like most hotel rooms these days, it had
an electronic card lock. Holliday bypassed it with the heel of his shoe. The door banged open.

“We've got maybe three minutes before security comes to the rescue,” said Lazarus.

“More than enough time,” said Holliday.

They began to search. At the one minute, forty second mark Lazarus withdrew a red plastic mailing tube out of the closet. It was sealed at both top and bottom with a cap.

“Shall we open it?” Lazarus asked.

“Why not?” replied Holliday.

“Here,” said Lazarus, handing over the long red case. “The honor is yours.”

Holliday took the tube, snapped off one of the caps and shook the contents onto the bed. There were two rolled canvases and a brown envelope folded outside them, everything held together with a rubber band. Holliday slipped off the rubber band and Lazarus came closer. He rolled the paintings open while Holliday picked up the envelope.

“Dear God in heaven!” Lazarus said, looking down at the two paintings lying side by side on the bed below him.

“What is it?” said Holliday.

“The one on the left is
The Stone Breakers
by Gustave Courbet and the other one is Caravaggio's
Saint Matthew and the Angel
.”

“What's so special about them?” Holliday asked. “You sound like you popped a heart valve.”

“Because neither one of these paintings exists anymore. They were both destroyed during World War II bombings.”

“Shall we keep 'em or take 'em?” Holliday said.

“Leave them,” Lazarus said. “I'd like to see where this trail goes.”

Holliday held up the brown envelope. “I'll tell you one thing,” said Holliday. “Miss Hannah Kruger of 104 Jasmine Street in Southfield, Wisconsin, can tell us a thing or two, but for now let's get the hell out of here.”

CRAQUELURE

Hannah Kruger, once known as Hannah Krugerovich Alevsky, headed out of the fine arts building of Caldwell College, went around the Gould Library and cut across the Bald Spot, then took a shortcut between the Laird Stadium and the residences. She checked for traffic, crossed the road and stepped onto the narrow footbridge across Cannon Creek to the residential side of the town. A few minutes later, she was on tree-lined Jasmine Street, turning through the open gates of the door in the low stone wall that went around her small saltbox house.

As she opened the door, she could smell turpentine and shellac. She smiled, went through into the kitchen, flipped on the coffeemaker and headed to the rear of the house and into her studio. She stared at the painting on the easel, smiled again and went back for her coffee. Sipping the
strong, harsh brew, she returned to the studio and sat down.

She looked at the painting again. It was a twelve-by-fourteen-inch watercolor of palmetto leaves in the sun. She had taken the necessary photograph of it during her vacation last winter in case anybody ever asked any questions. It was a perfect copy of John Singer Sargent's
Palmettos
, which had last sold to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for $7.5 million. The one on her easel would be sold to somebody in Europe for half that amount. One way or the other, the painting was hers.

Hannah had been born June 11, 1968, in Moscow. She attended the Moscow Art Institute until she was eighteen, then gained an internship at the Hermitage as an apprentice in the restoration department. In 1988, she began a brief affair with a much older man named Pytor Novestev, a midlevel official at the USSR Department of Immigration, who made good on his promise to allow her and her parents to emigrate to Israel. They stayed briefly—just enough time to get their Israeli passports—and then traveled to New York. Over the next few years, Hannah attended NYU, Columbia and the Canadian Conservation Institute in Ottawa, an institution renowned for producing some of the greatest art
conservators in the world. She worked for several years at the Guggenheim and was finally coerced into taking an appointment as head of the fine arts department at Caldwell College.

Pytor Novestev had also been a high-level KGB officer looking for potential sleepers in the United States. There had already been a plot to quietly sell off the Hermitage's lesser-known works, and several years later the KGB, now reformed as the FSB, began to develop the idea. Over time contacts were made with less than loyal members of MI6, the French DGSE, the BND in Germany and, most important, the CIA. It was the BND with its incredible record keeping that had discovered Huff's train and the complete inventory of its contents.

It was in this way that the Vatican had become involved. By the time Pope Benedict had been hired for the top job in the Catholic Church, the Vatican Bank was already in trouble, not to mention its other problems and scandals about priestly pedophilia and the enormous lawsuits that resulted from it. All in all, Vatican City was tipping into bankruptcy. With the election of the Argentinian Pope Francis, bankruptcy was inevitable. Being a practical man, as well as a Jesuit, Francis agreed to liquidate the world's art assets. The conspiracy was called Operation Leonardo, named
after the most famous artist in the world, Leonardo da Vinci.

Hanna Kruger was a small but vital part of the project. It was her job as a master copier and forger to re-create masterpieces that would replace the real artworks in museums all over the world. The real artworks would be deaccessioned and sold on the open market.

On the surface the plan was perfect, but in reality it went one step further. After announcing the upcoming sale of the work in question, one of Hannah's near perfect forgeries would go on the auction block instead. The original gallery or museum got to keep the original and Operation Leonardo got the cash. This worked especially well with the tens of thousands of works that had been looted from Germany, Poland and other soon to be Soviet countries that were then sent back to the Hermitage, never to be seen again. It also worked extremely well with the contents of Huff's train, in which the only inventory of the contents rested with the Vatican and the British secret police. It was really nothing more than a card player dealing from the bottom of the deck.

*   *   *

The planning committee of Operation Leonardo met at Bolton House, which they rented from
the National Trust. Bolton House was a beautiful and majestic country estate built of stone—the epitome of English country living. It was located in Lincolnshire and the house itself was surrounded by a thousand acres with three or four wooded areas plus its own lake. It was about as private as you could get.

The individual members of Leonardo and their personal security teams began trickling in early in the day. By evening the members, dressed for dinner, met in the dining room with its magnificent table capable of seating eighteen. The meeting began with a sumptuous catered dinner that included oysters with champagne vinegar mignonette, celery soup, fig and Stilton salad with port wine dressing, venison tenderloin with Madeira wine peppercorn sauce, Yorkshire pudding, shepherd's pie, floating islands with lemon custard sauce and raspberries, and English Eccles cake.

It was almost nine o'clock before the remains of the meal were removed and the men around the table were comfortably smoking cigars and drinking brandy. Finally Sir Henry Maxim, director of operations for MI6, tapped a spoon against his brandy snifter and called the meeting to order.

“Although most of us already know each other well, for the sake of our new guests I thought
proper introductions should be made. On my left, representing the CIA, is Russell J. Smart. Beside him is His Eminence Cardinal Secretary of State of the Vatican Arturo Ruffino, followed by Pytor Novestev, our Russian friend from the FSB; beside him, Dieter Rhine of the BND; and, last but not least, Thierry Grenier of France's DGSE.

“Together on my right are the new members of our organization. Representing India, Kota Raman of the well-known Raman family, Abraham Ivankov from Russian organized crime, from the Unione Corse Dominique Venturi. And from Japan, Katsu Giri, head of the Yamaguchi-gumi yakuza group. Thank you all for being here. I'll now turn the meeting over to Russell Smart from the CIA.”

“My friends,” Smart began, “over the past few years we have all come to the same conclusion. The entire world is rapidly approaching what the astronomers refer to as a singularity. In astronomical terms, a star becomes so heavy it falls in on itself, thus creating a black hole. In our own singularity, the entire world has come to the point where money has no true reality. Banks create invisible and meaningless things to sell to each other; entire countries are imploding. China has now become the inevitable snake eating its own
tail. It has almost inflated itself out of business by lending more money to the markets than they can possibly repay, thus losing those markets to sell to. India is on a bold upward curve based on low labor costs and virtually no environmental controls, and their government is totally corruptible and the perfect nesting site for capitalists from the West. At the same time India is literally killing itself as its freshwater supply dries up due to bad hygiene, creating pockets of plague that will eventually cover the entire country.

“In my own country, bailing out companies that can no longer survive has become a farce, yet the United States still believes itself to be the world's greatest country. Our biggest industries revolve around the military, but at the same time we start wars that we cannot hope to win. The whole world has gone crazy. The only way for us to succeed as a group is to develop our own economy. One of the ways we intend to do that is with Operation Leonardo. Our new member from Japan, Mr. Katsu Giri, has expressed an interest in our new ‘criminally' oriented members. I'll let him speak for himself and those other new members of Leonardo.”

Giri, a short, slim man with iron gray hair, took a short sip of brandy. His English was
perfect, though slightly accented. He nodded formally and began to speak. “My dear friends, the most common difficulty in the transfer of money from one place to another is its size and weight. Billions of dollars in currency are lost every year due to vermin infestations in the basements where it is hidden. The simple fact that a billion dollars in American currency weighs nine tons is an enormous problem. It's extremely risky to transport it in any of the ordinary commercial ways. Thus our proposal is this: Fine art is simple, compact and easy to move in any number of ways. In fact, international trade in such works of art can be done perfectly legally and with no customs necessary. By calculating the value of each work of art using an objective scale, the art held in a central bank or vault could then be used as currency. Ergo, one organization owes another organization a billion dollars. The first organization has a theoretical deposit in the bank of art and therefore pays the other organization in the value of X number of artworks that it has on deposit. In point of fact art has been used this way on a smaller scale for years. The art simply becomes a different form of currency. Our suggestion is that the banking institutions or vaults be located in countries not involved with Leonardo. There
are several of these, but obviously Switzerland would be the simplest and most central option.”

Cardinal Secretary of State Arturo Ruffino spoke up. “Why not the Vatican?” he said. “We already hold much of the art in our own vaults.”

Russell Smart laughed derisively. “I don't mean to be blasphemous, Your Eminence, but that would be rather like taking all the gold from Fort Knox and storing it in Sing Sing Penitentiary instead. You know as well as I do that the Vatican, particularly the Vatican Bank, has more corruption in it than a giant block of Swiss cheese. I agree with Mr. Giri. Set it up in Switzerland.”

For a moment there was a great deal of chatter around the table. After letting various people vent their opinions, Sir Henry Maxim rapped his knuckles on the linen tablecloth.

“Gentlemen, shall we vote on the subject? All those in favor of setting up their own bank or vault in Switzerland, raise your hands. Those against it and in favor of continuing the discussion on the subject, remain as you are.” Every hand was raised except for Ruffino's and Pytor Novestev's of the FSB.

“We appear to have a majority. It seems that Leonardo is going into the business of Swiss banking.”

*   *   *

Holliday sat in the window seat of the direct Air France flight to Nassau in the Bahamas and looked out the window into the dead black night. Beside him Peter Lazarus breathed evenly as he slept. The L-1011 was cruising at over thirty-eight thousand feet and the dark clouds rolling off into infinity mimicked the Atlantic so far below them.

He realized the feeling that had been slowly creeping over him, perhaps for years now. It was the soft breaking of his heart. How long had it been now since Amy's death? All he knew was that she had been gone longer than he had been with her. His memories of the good times had been eroded by the time he had lived without her. He could remember the sound of her voice, the feel of her skin and the look of her smile, but it gave him nothing now. Age had come upon him silently and with it a deep, weary loneliness.

To make it worse, his cousin Peggy and her archaeologist husband, Rafi, had been brutally murdered in the sands of Israel. And now Eddie, as noble a warrior as he had been a friend, had been murdered too. The people he'd treasured had vanished and all that was left was this never-ending quest that had begun almost a thousand years before in the heart of France.

The question was, did he care anymore or did he just want to do what soldiers always did—simply fade away? Once upon a time, he had loved nothing better than his life with Amy, his teaching at West Point and the book he was writing on the history of armor. All of that was long past. The future ahead was no more than the infinite nothingness of the skies outside his window. The search begun by his uncle was a noble one. But monks, martyrs and mythology had finally turned to what they inevitably had to become: money.

“Penny for them,” said Lazarus.

Holliday turned to his companion. “Gloom and doom, I suppose,” he responded.

There was a pause and then Lazarus spoke again. “Can I ask you a question?”

“Sure,” said Holliday.

“What does a bunch of looted art have to do with the Templars? I thought you were chasing the Dead Sea Scroll that is supposed to be the Gospel of Jesus.”

“My cousin Peggy and her husband died for that scroll and the message it contained. If it was ever discovered and publicized, it would rock the very foundations of the Church and perhaps shake the faith of half the world.”

“Then why look through the artwork on Huff's
train and whatever else was held in that old vault?”

“Because I think the scroll was in that vault. The Vatican Bank is in such serious trouble now that they'll even risk putting the scroll on the market. After all, the buyer who purchased it would need years to properly open it and translate it. And even if they went to that extreme, the Church could always deny its authenticity. The value of the scroll is ephemeral. Its worth is in the eyes of whoever owns it.”

“Well, if it's reason enough for you, it's reason enough for me.”