The Nostradamus File (12 page)

"Then there is a shorter way to the visitor center."

Nick's ear began itching.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

It was late in the afternoon when they arrived back at the
Visitor Center. The parking lot was almost empty. Nick gave Ahmed another 50 Dinar note. The guide seemed nervous. He thanked them and scurried away.

They walked over to the Land Rover. Nick's ear began to itch and burn. He pulled on it
, hard.

"Oh, oh," Ronnie said.

"Something's wrong," Nick said.

They looked around. Everything seemed normal.

"There goes Ahmed."

Selena pointed at a
white pickup speeding out of the lot. The guide was in the passenger seat. He didn't look back at them. The truck drove away fast, trailing plumes of dust.

"Kind of in a hurry," Lamont said.

"Remember when we were in Kabul?" Nick said to Ronnie. "That IED?"

"Yeah."

"I had the same sensation then."

"I don't see anything," Lamont said.

There was nothing in the area, no garbage bags, trash cans, packs, boxes, nothing that would conceal a threat. The nearest car was parked some distance away.

Lamont got down on his knees and peered under their truck. A black, oblong shape was stuck under the driver's side. A digital counter was marking down seconds in red. Lamont watched the numbers move past 20 to 19 to 18.

"Bomb!" he yelled. He scrambled to his feet. They ran.

They were more than a hundred feet away when the bomb detonated.
The force of the blast knocked them to the dirt. Nick went sprawling. Pain jolted his spine. Chunks and pieces of the Land Rover fell around them. The hood crashed down into the parking lot ten feet from his head. All that remained of the truck was a jagged tangle of metal that burned with bright, hot light, sending a dense column of black smoke spiraling into the clear afternoon sky.

Nick got to his feet. He looked at the burning wreckage. Lamont came over to him.

"Smells like Semtex."

"Ahmed," Nick said. "Our friendly guide."

"Maybe you should have tipped him more," Lamont said.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

The sat phone connection was good. "Everyone is all right?" Harker asked.

"Yes."

"No trouble about the guns?"

"No. The Jordanian cops are treating it as a terrorist attack on Western tourists. They never searched us. Selena distracted them. They even gave us a ride back to the hotel."

He shifted in the chair. His back was locked up tight.

"I'd like to get my hands on that guide. The bad guys just upped the ante."

"What's your plan now?" The connection sounded clear but far away.

"Selena is in the other room on the computer looking for something that ties into that inscription we found. We need to know where to go next. The inscription is the only lead we've got. If there's something there, she'll figure it out."

"I've been looking at Cask and Swords," Harker said. "Getting a membership list was next to impossible. People in this group are a who's who of American power. If they're behind this, we have a problem."

"We always have a problem."

"What I don't know is who is part of the core group Adam warned you about. There are a lot of people who would profit if there was another war. I'm working on narrowing down the list."

She paused. Nick heard her pen tapping in the background.

"There are several members who advise President Rice."

"You think Rice is involved?"

"No, I don't. He's not a member and everything he's done points the other way. But some of the people around him are. The Secretary of the Treasury, for example."

"Are you going to tell Rice about this?"

"Not until we have something concrete. I can't go to the President on the basis of what Adam told you. We don't even know who Adam is."

"You have a lot of credibility with Rice."

"Not that much. Follow up on what Selena finds out. Keep me up to date."

In Virginia, Elizabeth put down the phone. She looked through the bullet proof windows at the flowers growing over the underground rooms. The day was clear, sunny. She could have been in a
n average home almost anywhere in America. Project headquarters was anything but your average American home.

She looked at the list she
'd compiled of Cask and Swords members. Who were the conspirators? She had no reason to doubt what Adam had told Nick. He'd been right in the past. His intel had prevented millions of deaths and probable war.

Elizabeth glanced at the picture of her father on the desk. She remembered a conversation
with him from when she was fifteen. She'd had a complicated school science project due by the end of the week and hadn't been sure what would make it work. Her father had been in his usual chair, the big green one near the fireplace. It was a warm spring on the Western slope of the Rockies. The fire wasn't lit. The bourbon in his glass was warmth enough.

"I don't know where to start," she'd said.

"Have you made a list?"

"Yes, but there are too many things on it."

"What are the criteria?"

"Well, it's about the rate of gaseous diffusion in..."

"That's not what I asked. It doesn't matter what it's about. What matters is the critical thinking you apply to the problem. Whenever there's too much information you have to narrow things down. Sort out what's important and what isn't."

"How do I do that?"

"You have to ask yourself the right questions."

What were the right questions? She looked at the list. What would someone gain from starting a war? People who wanted to control things were usually driven by love, power and money. Elizabeth didn't think love factored in here, though some seemed to love war.

Power and money. The list had plenty of people on it who had both. She decided to pick out the top ten. Who had the most wealth, the most toys? In a hierarchy of Alpha males, that person would have serious clout. Who would benefit the most from war? She could find out. Almost everything that mattered was in the computers somewhere.

It was a scary thing to contemplate, the power of electronic surveillance at her fingertips. The government's fingertips. With that kind of power, it should be no problem to learn everything necessary about the members of Cask and Swords. She began searching, using a program Stephanie had written that made Google and the other search engines look like something out of the Stone Age.

It didn't take long for a pattern to emerge. It should have been easy to find what she wanted, but it wasn't turning out that way. She kept running into conflicting data and broken links. She entered a new search focused on a prominent Cask and Swords member.

Several hundred miles north of Virginia, a string of characters appeared on a monitor screen with the location of the Project computer. The server was programmed to respond with code designed to worm its way into the
computer of any curious person looking for a particular kind of  information.

In Virginia, Stephanie hurried into Harker's office.

"Director, shut your computer down."

Elizabeth turned it off. "What is it, Steph?"

"Someone just tried to break through our firewall while you were on the system," she said. "I blocked it and sent a trace back. What were you looking at?"

"
One of the Cask and Swords members. He hosts an annual retreat for them at his summer home in Maine."

"You were using the program I wrote? Not Google?"

"Yes. I wanted a deeper layer."

"Whoever he is, someone with serious computer savvy is working for him. My program triggered an auto response that tried to send a virus back to you. I quarantined it."

"It's not a standard security response?"

"No way. My program is transparent. I designed it to get through the firewalls at the Pentagon. A normal security program wouldn't respond to it."

"Will they know it was us looking?"

"Yes. To send something back they had to isolate our location, which is almost impossible. I'd like to meet whoever wrote the program."

There was grudging admiration in her voice. Stephanie was a legend in the small world of extreme hackers, where she was known only by her screen name, Wonder Woman. She'd worked for NSA before Elizabeth recruited her.

"This man head
s up the richest private investment bank in America," Elizabeth said. "Maybe that explains the security."

"Maybe."

On the list of Cask and Swords members, Elizabeth put an asterisk by the name of Phillip Harrison III.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Selena came into Nick's hotel room with her laptop under her arm. They were sleeping in separate rooms and separate beds. It had nothing to do with being in a Muslim country. Until Nick got a handle on his nightmares, it seemed like a smart move. Neither one of them was happy about it.

"What did you find out?"
Nick said.

"What do you know about the Templars?"

"Not a lot. I know they conquered Jerusalem and that they were knights that fought in the crusades."

"The Templars protected the routes to the Holy Land. They invented a banking system as a way to keep pilgrims from being robbed along the way. You gave your money to them and they gave you a piece of paper that was like a credit card. You could use that at Templar stations during your pilgrimage to pay for things. If you were robbed, it was worthless to the robbers. The Order charged interest. It made them wealthy, along with donations
of land and money from the nobles and the Church."

"Pretty slick.
And here I thought credit cards were a modern development."

"The King of France owed the Templars a lot of money he'd borrowed for his wars. He made a deal with the Pope and accused them of heresy so he could get out of paying."

"I hate to say this, but that sounds pretty modern, too. Like the banks making a deal with the government and blaming the little guy for going in debt."

"Anyway. The Order was disbanded. The leaders were tortured and burned at the stake. They had a large treasure but the King never found it. The Ark may have been part of that."

"Who was the king?"

"Phillip. He was called Phillip the Fair."

They both thought of it at the same time.

"The Fair King in the quatrain," Nick said. "Remember?"

"Yes." She pulled up the quatrain on her laptop.

That which was sought was not found

Fire and death no tongue would loosen

In the land of the fair king

The Pale Rider reigns supreme

"It makes sense," Nick said. "Nostradamus is talking about what happened to the leaders and the Templar treasure. Nobody told the king where it was, even when they were tortured."

''The pope and the king died not long after the heresy trials," she said. "Jacques de Molay predicted their deaths as they lit the flames under him."

"The Pale Rider reigns Supreme," Nick said.

"That manuscript is like a sentence of death for anyone who has it. There are a lot of people who want that treasure. Not to mention the Ark."

"We're the ones who have it now."

"You had to say that." She pushed hair away with the back of her hand.

"People will keep after us until we find the Ark or prove it doesn't exist. You said you
found something. What is it?"

"The Templars had branches all over Europe, especially in England and France. I
came across a medieval reference to a place called the House of Five Trees. It's a chapel in Normandy."

"Another tourist attraction?"

"No. I had some trouble locating it. It's off the beaten track and it was never an important site, not like some of the Templar buildings. It's just a small chapel in ruins, not much to see."

"Another stamp for the passport. I'll call Harker."

On the second ring she picked up.

"Yes, Nick."

"We need to go to France." He told her what Selena had discovered. "The chapel is in the countryside near Cherbourg."

"All right. Do it as soon as you can."

"There's an Air France flight to Paris tomorrow."

"Try to stay out of trouble."

"Roger that." He hung up.

"How about a glass of wine?" Selena said. She held up a bottle. "Chardonnay."