Lost City of the Templars (6 page)

On their first night in the inflatables, they drew the two Zodiacs into a small, vine-enclosed backwater on the right bank that would be invisible both from the water and the air. The water in the little inlet was black as ink and covered with some kind of water lily. Directly above them vines and moss hung down in great sweeping curves, and above that was the distant rain forest canopy itself. The air was breath-snatchingly hot and their clothes were damp with sweat. The inlet smelled heavily of rotting vegetation, and all around and above them was the chattering, clicking and screeching of creatures hiding in the shadows of the dying day.

They had pulled the two Zodiacs together for the night. Tanaki had used his fragile little bow and arrow to capture a pair of zebra catfish, and his grandfather Nenderu was cooking some sort of stew he’d made of the fish and local vegetation, boiling it all in a collapsible leather pot over the low flame of the expedition’s Primus stove.

“My grandfather says he likes your fire in a bottle very much,” said Tanaki.

“Tell him he can have it if we get out of this alive,” answered Holliday, flipping through the notebooks, looking for some clue as where to go next.

“A lot of bugs and things in places like this?” Peggy asked Tanaki.

“Tarantulas, wolf spiders, poisonous caterpillars, several kinds of scorpions. The jungle is not a very inviting place, missy. There are also caimans, like alligators, boas, anacondas, bushmasters . . . fire ants.”

“Which is why we sleep under these,” said Holliday as he and Eddie began to slide together the poles that made up the twin mosquito nets that enclosed the Zodiacs.

“You sure would make a hell of a salesman for Amazon Tours,” said Peggy to Tanaki. “Come to a land of enchantment where caimans eat you by day and giant anacondas swallow you whole.”

“Don’t forget the bushmasters,” added Rafi, dishing out Nenderu’s fragrant stew.

•   •   •

With the mosquito nets to protect them, the group settled in for the night.

“We’re supposed to sleep through all that?” Peggy asked, staring up through the netting. The sound was deafening, worse than it was during the day. Insects, night birds, larger creatures coughing, barking or growling. Peggy had always thought of the rain forest in almost a spiritual way: the grandeur of the canopy, the rain forest as the living, breathing lungs of the earth. She’d just never expected the lungs to be quite so noisy and quite so . . . real. Animals ate other animals, scorpions stung spiders, snakes killed monkeys—things died here all the time and they rotted, and what didn’t rot, the bugs ate.

“Just what the hell are we doing here?” Peggy asked. A giant brown moth landed on the netting six inches from her face, and she screamed. “Son of a bitch!”

“It’s a giant silk moth,” answered Rafi, “nothing to be frightened about, sweetie.”

“Don’t you sweetie me! This place is a horror show. Nobody in their right mind would come here!”

“Peggy’s got a point, you know,” said Holliday thoughtfully, leaning back on the heavy rubber inflatable hull.

“Peggy’s always got a point,” said Rafi, grinning fondly at his wife and squeezing her hand.

“I’m being serious,” said Holliday. “Fawcett looked for his lost city everywhere but north. On his last expedition, financed by latter-day Templars, he comes up the Xingu River—clearly with the first Lord Grayle and his White Gloves pulling the strings.”

“Wasn’t that because of the ships Fawcett discovered?” Peggy asked, snuggling into her husband’s enfolding arm.

“That’s what I thought originally, but now I’m not so sure.”

“Why?” Rafi asked.

“The First Lord Grayle was a businessman, a banker, in fact. I can see how a man of that period could get caught up in Fawcett’s dreams of lost worlds and limitless gold. Fawcett was even friends with Arthur Conan Doyle, the man who wrote
The Lost World
. That kind of thing holds a fascination for nearly everyone.” Holliday paused. “On the other hand the present Lord Grayle is the largest privatizer of water resources in the world among other things. I doubt that he’s got a romantic bone in his body.”

“You’re saying this all has to do with water?” Rafi asked.

“Not necessarily,” said Holliday. “But think about it. Rogov’s one of Grayle’s men and he’s been on us from the start. We’re following in Fawcett’s footsteps to some unknown destination that might give us some answers, but Grayle knows exactly what he’s after. You don’t firebomb people just for the fun of it. And don’t forget those fighter planes. I guarantee you they came from whatever Kate Sinclair calls her private army of thugs these days. This whole thing is big and we don’t even really know what it is.”

•   •   •

Dimitri Rogov, Steven Cornwell and Tashkin Akurgal flew the ancient single-engine de Havilland Beaver low over the jungle, moving steadily north, keeping the winding path of the Xingu far to the left; the last thing Rogov wanted to do was alert Holliday that they were getting ahead of them.

“You think maybe you could have found a better plane than this old crate?” Cornwell said, squirming on the cracked vinyl seat. “It’s got to be fifty years old.”

“More like sixty,” answered Rogov. “In the middle of Brazil, beggars can’t be choosers. You’ve been living in the lap of your master’s luxury for far too long,
muy droog
.”

“Your master, as well, Rogov, and don’t you forget it.”

The Russian turned in the pilot’s seat, his face gone suddenly dark. As if by magic a little Beretta Bobcat appeared in his hand, the pocket semiautomatic a few inches from the Englishman’s face. “Know this, my Anglo friend. No man is my master, not even your Lord Grayle. He has set me a task and I will do it and then I shall go my own way once more. Tell me you understand this, or my little gun will blow your brains through the window behind you and then your corpse will follow for the beetles and the flies to feed on.”

For a moment Cornwell returned Rogov’s malevolent stare with his own, but eventually he nodded.

“Good,” said the Russian, and they flew on.

Rogov recognized Fawcett’s Gardens of Babylon immediately: great slabs of dark rock in geometric tiers rising at least two hundred feet into the air, the broader slabs interspersed with narrower ones that jutted out slightly, each one covered in frothy cascades of gigantic pink and purple and yellow blooms, long tendrils of leaf-covered vine and drooping beards of heavy-hanging moss.

In the center was the waterfall itself, a great curtain of water streaming down in a rainbow torrent that struck the river below, throwing up the gentle mist that made the blooms glisten in the late afternoon sun. It was a magnificent sight, and Rogov couldn’t have cared less for the great natural beauty beneath his wings. The only thing that pleased him was the fact that there was no sign of John Holliday.

He took the old single-engine plane a little more than half a mile upriver from the falls and then landed. He let the de Havilland drift down on the current, using the pontoon rudders to keep the plane close to shore.

Eventually he spotted the place he wanted and switched on the engine again, forcing the aircraft up onto the muddy foreshore until the portside pontoon was hard aground.

“Why this filthy spot?” grunted Cornwell, staring out of the plane’s window at the mud.

“Because we’re going to need this little bird when we come back this way and I want her to be here when we do,” said Rogov. “We’ll tie the old bird up, get out our goods and then find a place to hit Holliday and his friends.”

•   •   •

Francisco Garibaldi, playing the part of Lord Jonathon Gibbs, third Baron Vauxhall, sat in the dining hall of Stonehurst Hall perfectly dressed in evening clothes, as were the other guests around the table, most of whom had come for the grouse shooting the following day. The women were equally well dressed, including Grayle’s dark-haired and extremely aristocratic-looking wife, the Duchess Caroline, who, by Garibaldi’s estimation, appeared to be at the top of the social heap among the women, all of whom were the wives of earls, viscounts, marquises and a few barons and baronets at the bottom of the heap. The priest was glad he’d studied up on terms of address on the plane in from Rome; one misstep and he would have been exposed as the imposter he was.

The meal, served by assorted footmen, with Beamish, Lord Grayle’s butler, pouring the wine, was a little extreme for Garibaldi’s slightly more plebeian taste: oysters, watercress soup, shrimp mousse, filet mignon, rack of lamb or roast squab, all with asparagus vinaigrette and pâté de foie gras, followed by a fruit and cheese plate and a variety of pastries. Each course was served with the appropriate hock, burgundy, Chablis, sherry or port.

Eventually all good things came to an end. The women withdrew to the drawing room, leaving the men to their brandy and their cigars. After half an hour of discussion, mostly about the relative qualities and differences between Purdey Doubles and Holland & Holland Over-and-Unders, the men “went through” and joined the women. Grayle hung back.

“A word?” Grayle said to Garibaldi.

“Certainly, Your Grace,” the priest replied.

“In the library, then,” said Grayle, ushering Garibaldi through a pair of ornate doors and into a large room. The walls were covered with books that looked as old as some of the ones in the Vatican Library. The high, ornate ceiling featured a central frieze that seemed to depict the Battle of Waterloo in excruciating detail.

“Whiskey?” Grayle asked, half filling a crystal tumbler at a drink stand off to one side.

“No, thank you,” said Garibaldi.

“Do sit,” said the duke, indicating a comfortable club chair. The priest did so and Grayle followed suit, sitting across from him. “Now, then,” said Grayle, taking a swallow from his glass. “Let’s get down to business, shall we?”

“Certainly,” said Garibaldi.

“The last time we met, you said you had something you wanted to show me. What is it?”

Garibaldi reached into the pocket of his dinner jacket and took out a single large, uncut and unpolished diamond. He leaned forward and placed it on the burled walnut table between them. Grayle picked up the stone and hefted it in his hand.

“Twenty carats in the rough,” he said. “And it’s not alluvial. It’s from a kimberlite pipe.”

“That’s right,” said Garibaldi.

“South Africa?”

“No, Your Grace. Brazil.”

“I don’t believe you. There are no pipes large enough to mine this size in Brazil.”

“Yes, there are,” said Garibaldi. “This diamond was mined there four hundred years ago.”

Holliday and the others arrived at the Gardens of Babylon in the late afternoon of the following day. They found the small cove and the broad brown sand beach exactly the way Fawcett had described it in his secret journal. Above the beach was a large shelf of slatelike stone. In the journals, Fawcett wrote that he had decided to camp there. Beyond the shelf of rock, the jungle began.

“If it was good enough for old Percy,” said Peggy, “I guess it’s good enough for us.”

They pulled the Zodiacs as far up the beach as possible, then drove pegs deep into the sand and tied the boats down. They threw out the claw anchors for each craft, then ran lines from the boats up onto the rocks, where they drove pitons between the layers of rock, further securing the inflatables.

“What’s with the sudden interest in keeping the boats secure?” Peggy asked.

“Because the water level is fickle,” Holliday answered. “It can rise four or five feet in a few weeks. We’re just making sure they’re here when we get back. Who knows how long this whole thing is going to take?”

“Days, weeks, maybe even longer,” said Rafi. “For some reason Fawcett didn’t date his entries, so it makes it tough to figure out a timeline.” He added, “My stomach says it’s time to eat something.”

The old man Nenderu gathered wood from the edge of the forest and made a fire while Tanaki disappeared into the jungle carrying his blowpipe, his bow, a quiver of arrows at his hip and his long steel-tipped spear.

He was back twenty minutes later with a ten-pound spider monkey slung over his shoulder. Peggy watched in horror as he gutted, skinned and butchered the carcass down into its basic parts. He took the meat, including the heart, to Nenderu, who skewered the pieces on a makeshift spit over the coals of the fire.

He paid special attention to the head, which he wrapped in broad banana leaves and stuffed deeply into the glowing coals, almost covering the dark green package.

Meanwhile Tanaki took several banana leaves and bound them together into a large, boatlike vessel. He piled the offal from the monkey into the interior of the banana leaves and then handed it to his grandfather. Nenderu took it to the edge of the river and squatted down beside the water and began to sing loftily in a lilting, eerie undertone.

“What is he doing?” Peggy asked Tanaki.

“He is making an offering to the river and to the jungle.”

Nenderu pushed the raft of banana leaves and offal into the water, where it quickly drifted into the main current. Fifty feet downstream from the camp, there was a sudden flurry in the water and a pair of snapping reptilian jaws swallowed the offering whole.

“What the hell was that!” Peggy yelped.

“Caiman. Like an alligator,” said Tanaki.

“They’re in the river?”

“And on the land. They lay their eggs by the edge of the water. Sometimes they come on land to hunt,” replied the Indian.

“Relax, Peg, you can always hear them coming.” Holliday smiled.

“How’s that?” Peggy asked suspiciously.

“You can hear the alarm clock ticking in his stomach,” laughed Rafi.

“Ha-ha,” said Peggy.

Half an hour later the meat was ready and Nenderu served it out on the aluminum plates they all carried in their packs. The meat was surprisingly tender and perfectly cooked. According to Tanaki, this was because the monkeys ate almost nothing but fruits and nuts.

As the meal ended, there was a distinct popping noise from the center of the coals. Nenderu dug out his banana-leaf-wrapped package and set it down on the rock. He unwrapped the banana leaves and withdrew the steaming head of the monkey.

The popping sound had been caused by the bursting of the skull. Borrowing Tanaki’s broad-bladed hunting knife, Nenderu pried the skull fully open, revealing the parboiled brain of the creature. He reached into the opening and, using three fingers, spooned out a large lump of the gray-white stuff and handed it around. Eddie took it enthusiastically.

“We have something like this in Cuba,” he said.
“Buñuelos de seso.”

“Brain fritters,” said Holliday. “I’ll try some of that.”

“I think I’m going to be sick,” groaned Peggy, turning her face away from the sight of the steaming monkey brain.

With dinner finally over, Eddie and Holliday cleaned up while Peggy and Rafi got out the sleeping gear and began to set up the tents and the mosquito netting for the night ahead.

With the tents up and darkness falling quickly over the jungle, Holliday noticed that Tanaki was crouched by the water’s edge, dragging his fingers through the water. Holliday joined him, squatting down beside the Indian. From his expression, there was no doubt something was bothering him.

“What’s the matter?” Holliday asked.

Tanaki lifted his fingers out of the water and rubbed them together. “Oil,” he said.

“Could it be from the Zodiacs?”

“Look,” said Tanaki. In the last of the fading light, Holliday could see a shimmering iridescent slick that began well ahead of their landing spot. “It comes from above the high water,” said Tanaki.

“An outboard from some little village upstream?”

“The only villages upstream belong to the Kayapo, who have no boats with engines, and anyway, the oil is much too heavy.”

“An airplane?” asked Holliday.

“I think so, and not too far from here or the oil would have been carried to the middle of the stream and would not be so visible.”

“We’ve got trouble, then.”

“Bad trouble.” Tanaki nodded. “Very bad.”

•   •   •

Lord Grayle had offered Francisco Garibaldi the use of his personal G5, but the killer priest much preferred commercial flight for the sake of anonymity. The Virgin Atlantic flight from Heathrow to Georgetown, Guyana, was twenty-odd hours long, including a two-hour layover in Boston that gave him plenty of time to recall the details of his conversation with Grayle and to plan out his modus operandi. The story he told to His Lordship was complicated and long, and his response had been predictable.

“According to the detailed Templar records kept in the Vatican Secret Archives, in April 1437 three ships left the Port of Lisbon. They were the
Santo Antonio de Padua
, the
Santo Ovidio de Braga
and the
Santo João de Deus
. According to your company, Excalibur Marine Exploration, the
Santo Antonio de Padua
contained twelve tons of gold Charles the Fifth francs. Supposedly they were to be delivered to a secret hiding place somewhere in South America.

“Also according to your company, the
Santo Antonio de Padua
and the other two ships became separated during a hurricane of immense force, probably a category five, much worse than Hurricane Katrina.

“Most of what your company reported was untrue, either because you were trying to lift the stock price of Excalibur or more likely you didn’t want the public to know what the
Santo Antonio de Padua
really contained, which was absolutely nothing, a fact you knew from the beginning.”

“Perhaps you can explain,” Lord Grayle responded when the priest had finished speaking, “why an empty ship was found that was supposed to be delivering a hoard of gold to a secret hiding place somewhere up the Amazon.”

“The answer is simple,” said Garibaldi. “The
Santo Antonio de Padua
was empty because she wasn’t
approaching
the mouth of the Amazon. She was leaving it, her great and most holy accomplishment already completed.”

“And what holy accomplishment would that be?” Grayle asked.

Garibaldi paused before he spoke. “The delivery of the holy relics from the hidden chambers far beneath the Bet HaMikdash, the Holy Temple on Temple Mount in Jerusalem.”

“And what holy relics would those have been?” Grayle’s skepticism seemed to be growing with every sentence.

“The Ark of the Covenant and all that it contained—the broken pieces of the tablets Moses brought down from Mount Sinai, the copy that was made from them, the iron head of the spear that pierced Christ’s side, sometimes referred to as the Spear of Destiny, the spiked iron crown of thorns placed around His head as a further torture, the eight nails used the crucify Him, the shroud He was wrapped in and the ossuary that holds the remains of His earthly body left behind—His bones.”

“Absurd,” Grayle said. “Everything you mentioned is nothing more than a myth that has gained complexity over time.”

“You are certainly right when you say the stories of the relics have been made elaborately complex over time, but think carefully. Crucifixion was a common form of punishment during the time of Christ, and using spikes to fix Him to the cross was a particularly vile form of the punishment.

“The legionaries of the Fourth Thracum Syriaca who occupied Jerusalem at the time of Christ’s death were an auxiliary legion and known for being particularly cruel and undisciplined, hence the crown of thorns and the spear.

“After the death of Christ, His family and His disciples would have gathered up the body, the spearhead, the nails and the crown of thorns and taken everything away for proper burial, which would account for the shroud. Fearing, quite correctly, that Christ’s earthly body would not be resurrected, they removed it from the tomb and took the body elsewhere, also concluding that those same legionaries who had defiled Him on the cross would defile and ridicule His corpse in its tomb.

“A year or two later they collected the bones and placed them in a chalk ossuary or burial box sixteen inches high and thirty-one inches long. These were all later placed in the Ark of the Covenant, which was described as being a wooden box four and a quarter feet long, two and a half feet high and two and a half feet wide.

“There are a great many stories about it being covered in gold with winged cherubim on the lid, but once again those are all hypothetical since the Ark was covered in a leather and wool
parokta
, or veil, at all times, and not even the priests were allowed to see it. At any rate, it was more than large enough to carry all the relics from Christ’s Crucifixion and later burial.”

“And you’re saying the Ark and all these relics within it were taken to the Amazon aboard the
Santo Antonio de Padua
? For what possible reason?” Grayle asked, laughing. “The whole thing’s just a load of tosh.”

Garibaldi continued his story. “The relics were taken by a group of dedicated and battle-hardened Templar warriors to the last secret stronghold of the Templar order deep in the jungles of northern Amazonia. The same place your grandfather and his White Gloves paid Percy Fawcett to find.” Garibaldi paused. “The same place these came from.”

He reached into the other pocket of his evening jacket and brought out a black velvet drawstring bag. He tipped the contents out onto the parquetry table beside Lord Grayle’s chair. A heap of diamonds cascaded out, some even larger than the single twenty-carat stone he’d shown Grayle before. “A kimberlite pipe so rich it has more stones than all of South Africa has mined in the last one hundred years. With this mine in your hands, you could corner the market in industrial-and gem-quality diamonds for the rest of time.”

“And if I was to believe this twaddle you’ve been handing me,” Grayle replied, “why on earth would I believe that you’d simply hand this enormously valuable asset to me on a platter, so to speak?”

“Because I’m appealing to your nature and your inclination as a businessman. You know as well as I do that the White Gloves, a latter-day version of the Templars, are just as much interested in money as the original Templars were.

“The Templars were no religious order, Lord Grayle. They were a power-accumulating and power-mongering bunch of thieves, murderers and blackmailers who used the Holy Mother Church and the Crusades as a rationale for plundering their way across the Middle East and back again. There’s really very little difference in our purposes here; the Vatican is as much in business as we are.”

“A business that’s been taking some bad hits on the public relations side of things. Child abuse, pedophiles, homosexuals and the like, I might add.”

“I assure you, Lord Grayle, we are quite aware of our own shortcomings, but like any business or any other organization, there are going to be bad apples. I’m also willing to lay odds that there are proportionately just as many so-called deviants among your own members of parliament and the House of Lords, or in the American House or Senate. People in glass houses really shouldn’t be throwing stones; there’s no telling what you might find underneath those particular rocks.”

“Touché, but why don’t we get down to brass tacks? What exactly do you want from me?”

“We need those relics; their discovery would go a long way toward bolstering the Church’s reputation.”

“What exactly do I get in return?”

“You tell me everything you know about Holliday’s expedition. I give you access to the diamonds, you give the relics to the Church and we both get Colonel John Holliday dead.”