The Templar Conspiracy (13 page)

22

Mike Harris, deputy director of operations for the CIA, sat in the darkened bunker of the Homeland Security Predator Ground Control Station. The bunker was a windowless, half-buried blockhouse on the edge of the Grand Forks Air Force Base, just outside of Grand Forks, North Dakota. A glass wall separated the control room from the pilot’s positions below. There were three drones flying today, one over the British Columbia-Washington-Idaho-Montana border looking for “humpers” carrying in loads of marijuana, another one cruising in a regular pattern over the Great Lakes from Duluth on Lake Superior to Rochester on Lake Ontario, and the third flying circles at 44,000 feet over the town of Winter Falls, New Hampshire. At that height the gray-blue, pilotless aircraft were invisible to the naked eye and even to binoculars. The drones were too small to show up on radar, turboprop operated to avoid being attacked by heat-seeking missiles and made out of carbon fiber rather than aluminum for further stealth.

General Angus Scott Matoon sat with Harris in the upper control room, smoking a cigar and watching the relay screens from the pilot’s positions on the console in front of them. He’d been given a report by Major Neville, his adjutant, earlier that morning and he was feeling quite pleased. The prairie fire had been extinguished via a hiking accident in a State Park in the Catoctin Mountains. It had barely made the back pages of the Washington newspapers, and besides a single clip on Channel 4, there had been no TV coverage at all.

“Do you ever catch anything?” Harris asked. “I’ve seen them used as hunter-killers in Pakistan and Afghanistan but that’s a whole different kettle of fish.”

“All they get is smugglers out west. Most of the terrorist types feel uncomfortable in that kind of environment. Camping in the woods isn’t for towel heads.”

Harris sighed. Matoon really was a bit of a stereotype, but the gruff, heavyset general was Sinclair’s man, so he really didn’t have any choice in the matter.

“We’ve picked up one or two persons of interest coming across the lakes, but it’s mostly cigarette smuggling out there. The rag heads don’t have too much experience with water, either. If you ask me the whole bunch of them are just a little on the lazy side. They fly over to Canada, which lets anyone into their stupid country, and then they try to fly into the States. That’s how the 9/11 Arabs got in. They gotta know that any brown-skinned guy with a name like Yusef or Achmed’s going to get pulled out of the line. The real stupid ones try to take the bus to save money. There’s about three thousand miles of open border they could cross on foot, perfectly safely, carrying an A-bomb but they always do it the hard way.”

The 9/11 terrorists had not entered through Canada, despite the myth. They’d entered the country through New York, L.A. and Miami with U.S. documentation, but that was beside the point. Fiddling with the joystick to the left of the screen he could zoom, pan and tilt like any film camera, completely independently of the operator on the floor. Matoon watched him play, a smile on his jowled face.

“My grandson plays
Avatar
with a stick like that; makes people fly, guns fire, people move. It’s all beyond me. The kid’s eight years old and he could probably fly one of these better than the guys down there at the controls.”

“How many people in the town?” Harris asked, watching the monitor. He was flitting around like Peter Pan at rooftop level now. It was almost vertigo inducing. He could see the tops of people’s heads as they trudged down the sidewalks in their winter clothes. A cop car drove down the main drag.

“About two thousand this time of year.”

“What do you figure as the collateral damage?”

“Couldn’t tell you,” said Matoon, blowing a smoke ring. “High, I expect. The whole idea is to scare the living crap out of the entire country, not just tell them the sky is falling.”

“How many cops in Winter Falls?”

“Eight on any shift. Shifts are twelve hours, so there’re eighteen active officers. Eight are patrolmen on each shift. We know where all the off-duty officers live. He’ll take care of them first.”

“What about the county sheriff?”

“Eleven miles away. Not a problem. Two roads into town. Pick the right weather situation and it’s a lockdown.”

“So the whole thing is going down?”

“You having second thoughts?”

“No, not really,” said the CIA man.

“Sure you do. Anybody would think twice about what we’re doing. This is the big time. We do this, we save the country.” The general made a snorting sound. “Our president’s a pussy. America’s going down the toilet. We can’t let that happen. We need a strong hand in the White House.”

“It’s not far from being a coup d’etat,” said Harris. “And we’re talking about a lot of casualties.”

“How many people died in 9/11?” Matoon said.

“Twenty-eight hundred,” answered Harris.

“About the same here.”

“You know this is different.”

“Why? Because of how your asset is going to do it? Don’t be a fool. There are always civilian casualties in war—it’s a given, no matter how those casualties are inflicted.”

Harris stared at the monitor. He could see people ice fishing on the frozen lake, kids making a snowman on a lawn. Students at the Abbey School playing hockey. He’d read the reports, studied the dossiers, knew the town inside out even though he’d never set foot in the place.

“You realize if we stop him and ‘uncover’ the plot at the last minute, we’ll be heroes.”

“Sure.” Matoon grinned. “The prez would give your boss a medal, but it wouldn’t get anything like the coverage if we go through with it.” The general reached over and patted Harris on the shoulder. “Like another president once said, ‘Stay the course,’ Mr. Harris. We’re doing this to make America great again.”

“You’re sure this is going to work?” Peggy asked. They were driving yet another rental car, this one picked up at Montréal-Trudeau International after their arrival from Zurich. Holliday was behind the wheel, piloting the big Ford Explorer down the eight-lane, snow-blown freeway. They were more than an hour outside of Montreal, traveling due west, the St. Lawrence River a quarter mile away on their left. It might as well have been Antarctica for all they could see. It was only two o’clock in the afternoon but they were driving with all their lights on, halogen fog lamps included.

“It’s the only chance we’ve got,” Holliday answered. “Homeland Security will have our passports, prints and pictures on file. We try to fly in and we’ll be picked up in ten seconds. All the border crossings will have our names in their computers. That’s why I picked up the Explorer from that little local company. No U.S. affiliates, so they can’t be scanned by the Men in Black.”

“Couldn’t we have just waited out the weather in Montreal?”

“This is just the kind of weather Harry likes for this sort of thing,” said Holliday, peering down at the odometer. The vehicle had almost two hundred thousand kilometers on the dial and was seven years old. The only speed for the wipers was intermittent, and the only heat came from the defroster keeping the windshield clear. Both Holliday and Peggy had bought down ski jackets and winter boots in the little town by the airport, but despite bundling up, Peggy’s teeth were still chattering.

“Almost there,” said Holliday. Through the thumping windshield wipers moving melting slush from one side to the other Holliday saw an exit sign for MacEwan Boundry Road and eased the Explorer into the far right lane. There was hardly any traffic on the highway, but even in a four-wheel drive vehicle one wrong move could be a disaster. The exit came up and he slowed even more, going around the small cloverleaf and passing over the wide, straight highway they just left. Holliday drove slowly along a two-lane blacktop that was now perfectly white.

“This is a blizzard,” said Peggy nervously.

“This is Canada in the winter,” said Holliday.

“This is life threatening,” said Peggy. “Why are we meeting this friend of yours at a Subway in the middle of nowhere? And just who exactly is this mysterious Harry?”

“He’s a Mohawk Indian.”

“So?”

“He and I were in the Rangers together. When he retired he went back to the rez, settled down, opened a business, got married, had two kids—the whole thing.”

“Is he Canadian or American?”

“Both. The reservation straddles the river, so he claims both nationalities. He likes to fight, so he joined the Rangers.”

“That still doesn’t explain why we’re meeting him in the middle of a blizzard at a Subway.”

Holliday laughed. “He loves subs. That’s all he used to talk about when we were in the bush. Meatballsubs. As soon as he saved up enough money he bought a franchise.”

“And this has to do with our present predicament how?”

“He set up a little boatbuilding business for local fisherman, as well. Sold outboard motors, too.”

“So?”

“He sells snowmobiles in the winter.”

“Why am I getting this sinking feeling?” Peggy said. The familiar black-and-yellow sign of a Subway restaurant appeared through the whirling snow. Holliday pulled into the recently plowed parking lot. At the far end of the lot was a new-looking Land Rover Defender with a plow attachment.

“Nice ride,” commented Peggy. “I didn’t think there was that much money in cold-cut combos and Ski-Doos.”

“Harry has other sources of income,” said Holliday. He climbed out of the Explorer and pushed his way through the snow to the brightly lit entrance of the Subway. Peggy reluctantly followed him through the cold.

The inside of the sandwich shop was brightly lit and toasty warm. There were two men behind the long, high counter. One was an adolescent, mouth set in a constant teenage sneer, his chubby cheeks set into a square serious face. He was wearing a paper hat and smoking a cigarette. The other man was in his fifties, hard-faced, his long black hair gathered into a ponytail. He had a wrestler’s body, and like the boy he was wearing a silly paper hat. He was sitting on a stool and reading a copy of the
Cornwall Standard Freeholder
. He jumped up when he caught sight of Holliday.

“One Eye!” He grinned. He came across the room and slapped Holliday on the back, and the two men went through a complicated ritual handshake.

“Act like two old geezers at a Masonic meeting,” grunted the teenager, scowling and sneering simultaneously.

The man with the ponytail tuned away from Holliday and gave Peggy a long, appraising look. “You must be Peggy.” His smile broadened. He had two eyeteeth capped with gold, which made him look like a wealthy vampire. “I’m Harry Moonblanket.” He cocked a thumb in the direction of the chubby-cheeked teenager. “The lump there is my American nephew, Kai-entaronk-wen.”

“What he means is, my name is Billy Two Rivers.” He turned to his uncle, the sneer still intact. “Screw you, Chief Wears Depends.”

“Mouth like a rat trap,” said Harry proudly. “Chip off the old block.”

“Hippie,” grunted Billy.

“You ready, One Eye?” Harry said, turning his attention to Holliday.

“I thought we were going to wait for nightfall. No moon and all that.”

“This is better,” said Harry. He removed his paper hat, took a fur-lined hooded parka down from a hook and shrugged it on. “Nighttime, they fly helicopters with searchlights. Weather like this, they’re deaf, dumb and blind.” He pointed toward the ceiling. “Even the big eyes in the sky can’t see anything.” He came out from behind the counter, turning once to give his instructions to Billy. “We get any customers, give them their subs at half price. Meatball subs on special, two for one.”

“Anybody who travels in this weather just to get a sub is out of his friggin’ mind,” Billy responded.

“Just mind the store, kid.”

“
Onen
, Uncle. Good luck,” said Billy

“
Onen
and
Niá-wen
, Nephew.” Moonblanket took Peggy by the elbow. “We’ll take the Rover. You ride shotgun, sweetheart. Nothing like a pretty girl beside you for good luck.” They headed out the door.

“Where are we going?” Peggy asked.

“To a place where the streets are paved with gold, my dear—twenty-four carat.”

23

Seated at the counter in Gorman’s Restaurant, Chief Randy Lockwood bit into his Denver sandwich. It was way past lunchtime but there’d been a minor drug bust at the high school that morning and the paperwork had taken him well into the afternoon.

An occasional dime bag of weed trickling down from the Quebec side of the border was one thing—he’d smoked and inhaled more than his share back in the sixties—but cocaine was something else again.

The locker bust had come on an anonymous tip, which meant it was one student ratting out another. By the time he’d gotten around to it, Tommy Horrigan, the owner of the locker in question, was in the wind. Making it worse was the fact that the kid had turned eighteen the week before, putting him in adult court whenever they managed to track him down.

Complicating matters for Lockwood was the fact that Mark Horrigan, the kid’s old man, was chairman of the Wolf Run Golf and Country Club and the owner of Wolf Run Retirement Estates, an adult living development on the northern edge of town. A local bigwig. Going up against Mark Horrigan was not going to be pleasant. Horrigan was a shrimp with a severe case of short-man syndrome and far too much money. He’d been an obnoxious little bastard since grade school and nothing much had changed since.

Lockwood glanced out the big, half-steamed-over window and out onto Main Street. Anything moving by necessity had four-wheel drive. It was another one of those hell-born blizzards birthed somewhere in arctic Quebec for no good reason. Maybe it was one of the old Indian gods getting revenge for the arrival of the French in the 1500s. What had one of those early explorers called it? The Land God Gave to Cain. No kidding.

“Why does everybody in this town have to know everyone else?” said Lockwood. He put down the sandwich half and picked up his cup of coffee.

“That’s what small towns are all about,” said Reggie Waterman, wiping his steel hook on his apron. “Everybody knows how much money you’ve got in the bank, everyone is screwing or has screwed your wife at one time or another and everyone knows if you’re using Viagra or not.”

“Small towns suck,” said Lockwood on the other side of the counter.

“Amen,” said Waterman. “Speaking of which, Terry Jones over at the feed store says someone came in yesterday and bought eight hundred pounds of that Incitec fertilizer. Terry’d never seen the guy.”

“Who needs eight hundred pounds of fertilizer in the middle of winter?” Lockwood asked, suddenly interested. The Oklahoma City bombing had used a ton of ammonium nitrate and diesel fuel to take out the Murrah Building, yet more than fifteen years later there were still no federal regulations about buying the stuff. A couple of states required identification to be shown but that was about it.

“He get any ID?”

“Maine driver’s license.”

Which didn’t mean a damn thing. “He say why he wanted it?”

“Said he was from a big greenhouse operation in Brunswick. They got caught short, he said.”

The Falls were a long way from Brunswick. Sixty miles or so. Surely there was some place closer to buy fertilizer.

“Which greenhouse?”

“He didn’t say,” answered Waterman. A group of kids from the Abbey School with skates slung over their shoulders swept in on a blast of frigid air. Reggie came out from behind the counter, took their orders for French fries with gravy and cheeseburgers, then came back and went to work at the grill. Streak Lockwood took another bite of his sandwich. Bad weather or not he was going to have to take a trip out to Terry Jones’s place when he was done eating. Just in case.

They stepped inside a tumbledown boathouse, but instead of boats there were two canvas-covered lumps on the frozen surface of the water. Someone was already waiting for them, an alien figure taller than Moonblanket and wearing what appeared to be a space helmet and a suit made out of dangling white strips of fabric.

“I don’t see any twenty-four-carat gold,” said Peggy. “Just the Abominable Snowman here.”

“Brandon Redboots—a friend of mine,” explained the Mohawk.

The figure in the white gillie camouflage suit nodded silently.

The blizzard wind outside was rattling the walls and roof like the Big Bad Wolf. Moonblanket went to a locker and took out three sets of loose, drooping gillie suits in pure white.

“Put these on,” the Mohawk said.

“I’ve never dressed up as a yeti,” said Peggy, slipping her legs into the one-piece suit.

“When I was a kid there was a book called
The Disappearing Bag
,” said Moonblanket. “That’s exactly what these are.”

“Hot,” said Peggy, her voice muffled inside the suit.

“Not for long,” said the Mohawk. He went back to the locker and brought out three full-face GMAX snowmobile helmets, once again in pure white. Holliday and Peggy jammed theirs on. Moonblanket stepped down onto the ice and pulled the canvas covers off the two lumps, revealing a pair of white snowmobiles.

“Arctic Cat Z1 Turbos,” said Moonblanket. “Just about the fastest you can get.”

“How fast?” Peggy asked.

“About a hundred and ten or so on a good ice surface.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“We’re usually going a little slower than that because we’re towing cargo pods. Maybe sixty or seventy.”

“Cargo pods?”

“Ask me no questions, I tell you no lies,” said Moonblanket. “Peggy, you ride with me. Doc, you go with Brandon.” Peggy dropped down onto the slick ice and climbed on behind Harry, who was straddling the front seat. Brandon Redboots got into the driver’s position on the second machine. When they started up Peggy was surprised at how quiet they were and said so.

“Double mufflers on the engines. Polaris silent running chains and gears,” answered Moonblanket.

“How long is this going to take?” Holliday asked.

“On a good day, maybe three minutes,” said the Mohawk. “It’s about a mile and a half all told. Five hundred yards to the island, which is still on the Canadian side, then a little less than a mile to Raquette Point on the U.S. side. The only danger is in the first minute—from here to the island. From the island to Raquette Point it’s Akwesasne land. The Feds can’t touch us.”

“Don’t they have tribal police?” Peggy asked, her voice blurred by the helmet but still understandable.

Harry Moonblanket pointed at the silent man sitting directly in front of Holliday. “Meet Chief Brandon Redboots of the Akwesasne Tribal Police.” He laughed, gunned the engine and burst out through the open front of the old boathouse. Without a word Redboots followed them out into the whirling snow.

The wind roared all around them as they raced across the frozen river channel, the cold steadily leaking through the suit and then Peggy’s ski jacket. Within thirty seconds she was freezing, teeth chattering inside the helmet. Suddenly, out of the corner of her vision she saw a shadow racing beside them, perhaps fifty yards away. She wouldn’t have seen anything if the other snowmobile hadn’t been bright yellow with a pulsing blue-and-red light on a short mast. It was slowly sliding in their direction. In front of her Harry Moonblanket let out a high-pitched yell and then a string of incomprehensible words that Peggy assumed were the Mohawk equivalent of swearing. She turned her head and saw a second blue-and-red light on their right.

“Who are they?” Peggy asked, yelling into the side of the Mohawk’s helmet.

“Mounties!” Harry yelled back. “The river’s federal property! Hang on!” The Mohawk twisted the throttle and they surged forward, almost tipping Peggy off the back of the racing machine. The pulsing lights were getting closer. She had a flashing memory of some old movie with a Mountie singing on a horse and knew there’d be no singing cops out here. Directly ahead of them an angled ramp of packed snow appeared.

Harry hit the ramp at full speed, with Holliday and Redboots right behind them. Trees appeared at the top of the ramp and Peggy realized they were on land once again. Almost immediately Moonblanket throttled back and slowed. A hundred yards farther on in the gully he stopped and let Redboots come up beside him.

“Old Panthers,” grunted Redboots speaking for the first time, his visored face invisible.

“What’s he talking about and why have we stopped?” Peggy asked urgently, looking back over her shoulder for the telltale red-and-blue flashing lights. There was nothing but blowing snow. “Where are the Mounties?”

“This is Cornwall Island,” said Moonblanket, sitting in front of her. “Akwesasne land. The Mounties can’t set foot on the place without asking our permission and Brandon’s not likely to give it under the circumstances.”

Chuckling, Redboots began to sing in a low, guttural voice:
“Teiohonwa:ka ne’ni akhonwe:ia Kon’tatieshon iohnekotatie Wakkawehatie wakkawehatie.”

“What’s he saying?” Peggy asked.

“It’s his favorite song about paddling his canoe. He always sings when he beats the Flat Hats.”

“The Flat Hats?”

“The Red Jackets, the Mounties,” explained Moonblanket.

“How did they know we’d be there?” Holliday asked seriously.

“Billy phoned them up and told them. He’s the tribe’s official confidential informant.”

“Your nephew?”

“Sure. The Akwesasne survive on smuggled cigarettes. We even own our own tobacco farms. It’s in the treaty from about two hundred years ago. Sometimes we get some serious criminal types down from Montreal, bikers mostly, try to horn in on our business. Billy informs on them. Makes a few bucks for himself. He goes to university now, so he needs the bread.”

“He did it on purpose?” Peggy asked.

“Sure. I told him to. We’re on Z1 Turbos. The Flat Hats use old Panther 440s. If we’d been dragging a pod of smokes they maybe coulda caught us, but not with one passenger each. No contest.”

“It scared the hell out of me,” said Holliday.

“Speaking of which,” said Peggy, “can we get to where we’re going to sometime soon? I have to pee.”

Morrie Adler sat on one of the couches in the Oval Office and waited for the president to calm down. Outside the tall, bulletproof windows it was a winter-wonderland postcard, everything covered in a disguising mantle of snow.

“I won’t do it!” the president steamed. He’d been a secret smoker until a secret checkup had told him in no uncertain terms that he’d better become a secret quitter, which he had, but the side effects of nicotine withdrawal were secretly making him very testy. It occurred to Morrie that wars could be declared or escalated on the basis of the president’s physical condition. There was no doubt in his mind that Roosevelt would have done better at Potsdam if he’d felt better, and whether people liked to admit it or not the last couple of years of Ronald Reagan’s term, the White House and the country had been run by his staff.

“They’re plugging a hole,” said Adler. “Nothing more.”

“They’re not plugging a hole; they’re reading polls,” said the president.

“Sinclair’s the all-out favorite for the job.” Adler shrugged. “You’ve put off appointing a vice president for too long already, kemo sabe. Make your choice or do what the party wants, but do it fast.”

“You mean do what that psychopath Kate Sinclair wants,” snorted the president. “From what I hear, she’s been whoring herself all over Capitol Hill for two weeks now, kissing asses, gathering in favors and blackmailing what’s left over.”

“It’s what the country wants, as well,” said Adler. “Ever since
you know who
was in this office the nation’s been polarized; there is no center line. That’s a tightrope you can’t walk along anymore. The people want guns and butter, give them guns and butter.”

“I’ll think about it,” said the president.

“Think fast,” said Adler. “Time’s a-wasting.”