The Templar Conspiracy (14 page)

24

Bedford Mills, Virginia, was the perfect western Virginia town. Main Street really was called Main Street, the churches all had snow-white steeples and the redbrick courthouse in the middle of town had a white cupola and a bell that was once used to call out the volunteer fire department.

The population of Bedford Mills was slightly more than five thousand and more than two-thirds of the adult males owned rifles. Almost the same percentage owned handguns and half of them owned fly rods for catching trout in the cool, clear streams that fed White Mountain Lake. There were no Hispanic families in Bedford Mills and only a very small percentage of the population was African American. There was one family of Chinese descent, Ross and Katie Wong and their kids, but they were fourth-generation American.

The biggest employer in the town was Savage Trucks, which custom built water tankers, milk tankers, dump bodies and sanitation trucks. The other major employer was the Wolf Ridge Distillery, which made a variety of specialty liquors, the most popular being Stonewall 12-Year-Old Bourbon. All in all, safe territory for Senator Richard Pierce Sinclair to have a town hall meeting on the coming threat of domestic terrorism in America.

The town hall itself was located on South Tower Street on the far side of the old Norfolk and Western tracks. It was only a few minutes’ walk from the old Liberty Depot, which was now a family restaurant with cute menu items listed under titles like Main Line, Water Towers and Cabooses.

Once upon a time the town hall had been home to the Bedford Mills Klavern of the Ku Klux Klan. It was briefly used as a headquarters building by Stonewall Jack-son during the Civil War, and eventually became the local Mason’s Lodge. The Masons faded away in the area, and in its final incarnation it was used as a recreation center by the Knights of Pythias.

Try as they might the Pythians couldn’t keep up with the slow decay of the 150-year-old building and it was finally rescued by the Bedford Mills Historical Society, which bought it for a dollar, then brought it back to its former glory, then handed it over to the town. The ground floor was now the town library while the second-floor stage and auditorium were sometimes used for local theater productions, award presentations by local service clubs and events exactly like the one taking place this evening.

The original dressing rooms were located behind the stage and had been redecorated from the burlesque era for some unknown reason. There were posters of Fanny Brice everywhere and a couple of Moulin Rouge posters, as well. Each of the three dressing rooms had a small couch, a rotating makeup chair and a wall-to-wall mirror.

Kate Pierce had chosen the middle of the three rooms and had waited on the couch while Chelsea, the hired movie hair and makeup girl, made her son look even more senatorial than he was. She added salt-and-pepper highlights to his temples and a few age crinkles around the eyes for wisdom, and then helped him insert the gray contact lenses that dignified his washed-out blue eyes.

As a final touch Sinclair’s mother handed her son a very up-to-date pair of cherry-red half-glasses to pull from his pocket when he was reading something or appearing to, even though at forty-six he still had twenty-twenty vision. When Kate was satisfied with her son’s appearance she gave the hair and makeup girl a hundred dollars and dismissed her.

“Is all of this really necessary, Mother?”

“It’s television, dear,” answered the elderly woman. “If Nixon had worn a little pancake that night in Chicago things might have gone very differently.”

“Local?”

“Network, cable, bloggers, the
New York Times
. Fox, looking for blood. The message is beginning to get through, darling, just as I knew it would.”

“I’m still not sure about this, Mother,” said the senator, a worried expression on his perfectly made-up face. “With the Pope being assassinated and the vice president dying . . . There’s been so much violence, I don’t think I should look as though I’m advocating more.”

“Not advocating, dear; warning about it. Our borders are like sieves; the economy is in the sewer; the poor, the homeless and the unemployed are at the end of their rope. There’s bound to be a groundswell of grassroots violence that will spread through the country like wildfire unless something is done about it, and quickly.” Since Kate Sinclair wrote her son’s speeches it wasn’t surprising that she could quote from them at length.

“That’s like asking for martial law. A dictatorship,” argued the senator.

“We’re not asking for either one. We’re asking for the strong America of the past. Better security. Vigilance. The ability to find our enemies and destroy them before they do the same to us.”

“How about something like this,” suggested the senator, the timbre of his voice adopting its senatorial edge. “Guantánamo was a failure because we didn’t annex the whole damn island during the Spanish-American War and Kennedy didn’t have the courage to invade properly at the Bay of Pigs in ’sixty-one. As for the Japanese, it’s been almost seventy years since Pearl Harbor. It’s ancient history and so are the internment camps. If a reporter or anyone else asks about places like Manzanar, we counter with Changi in Singapore.”

“Excellent.” Kate Sinclair beamed.

“When is it scheduled to happen?” the senator asked.

“Better if you don’t know exactly, dear. It will seem more natural.”

“He knows what to do?”

“He’s the best,” assured the senator’s mother.

“And when it happens?”

“Act the part,” said Kate Sinclair. “
Sic semper tyrannis
but with a happy ending.”

The auditorium had seating for a 180 people and standing room under the balcony for 60 more. The balcony itself had long ago by default turned into a storage area for old props and costumes, since the hall was rarely used for theatrical productions now that the Mountain View Cinema had closed down and was the home of the Bedford Little Theater.

Tonight the auditorium was packed, mostly with locals but also with reporters and cameramen from all the national networks and newspapers. In the time since the assassination of the Pope and the death of the vice president, Senator Richard Pierce Sinclair had gone from being an obscure albeit handsome junior senator with a strident message that almost never made the news to a pundit on CNN when it came to issues of terrorism. He was a regular guest on everything from
Meet the Press
to Glenn Beck’s TV and radio shows, and “author” of an upcoming book titled
American Terror,
which had already been accepted for publication by Regnery Publishing, the foremost conservative publisher in the nation.

Tonight was Senator Sinclair’s eighth town hall meeting, and the most heavily attended by the national press. When he was interviewed the week before on
Larry King Live
, the comment was made that in recent days it seemed as though the senator was campaigning for president. His reply was a nice, gap-toothed smile and the perfectly scripted response: “Not this year, Larry. Being a senator is enough for any American.”

As usual, security at the meeting was provided by the Blackhawk Security, a subsidiary of Kate Sinclair’s main corporation, the modern version of the original Crusader Pipe and Tile Corporation, now generally known as IPT International. There was a pair of armed guards at each of the four exits, and a metal detector and a wand-carrying guard at the main entrance. There were four more guards close to the stage and two out in the parking lot.

The guards were dressed like Secret Service agents, complete with lapel pins and wrist microphones. This was no coincidence; Kate Sinclair was well aware that presentation was everything these days and the Secret Service- style guards were nothing more than an extension of the makeup that Jack Kennedy used—and Richard Nixon didn’t—during the debate in 1960.

Senator Sinclair appeared on stage at eight fifteen p.m., exactly on time. He looked composed, with a slight touch of the humble in his demeanor. Tonight, given the small-town, essentially rural audience, he was wearing old lace-up shoes, well-worn blue jeans and a brown sports jacket over an open-necked, plain white shirt. His Yale ring was missing, and his usual Rolex President had been replaced by a Timex Indiglo.

The ruddiness and color of his cheeks, given to him by Chelsea the makeup girl, lent him the appearance of a man who spent a great deal of time outdoors. Educated at places like Exeter and Yale, the senator had long since lost any trace of his native Virginia accent, but like any good politician he was able to affect the twangy drawl of his youth any time he wanted—the help of a speech coach his mother hired for him every summer didn’t hurt.

As usual Senator Sinclair’s opening remarks took the form of a canned speech he’d given dozens of times before about the threat of domestic terrorism. It was peppered with sound bites for the networks, and while it never mentioned American-born Muslims as the generators of such terrorism the speech inevitably mentioned that there were “as many as” five million Muslims in the United States, which provided a “rich environment” for extreme political views. The overall feeling was that the Muslim community was growing by leaps and bounds and would soon surpass Christianity’s slim numerical majority in the world unless something was done, and done soon.

The inference was clear, even if only subliminally stated: America was a Christian nation. The currency said it, the Pledge of Allegiance said it, the Constitution of the United States said it, and so did the Declaration of Independence. It was an old and very American principal: he who is not my friend is by definition my enemy.

At exactly eight thirty, as applause and cheers echoed around the auditorium, every camera in the room was either in tight close-up of the senator as he appeared on the stage, looking slightly embarrassed by the adulation of his audience, or wide on a shot of the enthusiastic crowd as it clambered to its feet in a standing ovation. Senator Sinclair moved to center stage and stood in front of a simple lectern to give his speech.

According to the time code on the endlessly analyzed raw CNN tape it was 8:31:30:09 when someone on the far right side of the second row drew an odd-looking handgun from beneath his jacket and screamed out something in Arabic just before he fired. The man’s voice was loud and clear in the high-ceilinged old hall.

“Bismillâh ir-rahmân ir-rahîm! allâhu akbar! lâ ilâha illâ-llâh!”

It took CNN in Atlanta barely five minutes to have the phrase translated: “For the glory of Allah, most merciful and most compassionate! Allah is great! Allah is the one true god!” According to the translator the dialect was either Egyptian or Syrian.

Completely vulnerable behind the simple lectern, the stricken Senator Sinclair spun around and crumpled to the floor. The gunman, still screaming, ran toward the fire exit on the right-hand side of the stage. A total of six Blackhawk security guards fired at the man independently, striking him eleven times in the head, neck and chest. He was dead long before he reached the floor, bone, blood and brains spattering in every direction.

Two hundred and thirty-two people in the auditorium ran for the stairs and the emergency exits. The first person to reach the fallen senator was his mother, who had been watching from the wings.

She fell to her knees and gathered her only son into her arms. The CNN cameraman who was one of the very few who had remained in position caught the shot perfectly. So did a local freelance photographer named Patrick Henry Jefferson, who worked mostly, but not exclusively, for the
Bedford Mills Bulletin
, and who shot the scene from a slightly but crucially different angle that caught the scarlet blossom of blood on the senator’s snow-white shirtfront and the perfect look of maternal shock and anguish on Kate Sinclair’s aging, handsome, aristocratic face.

Within three minutes of the shooting a tape was uploaded onto YouTube and a tweet went out on Twitter purportedly from the group Jihad al-Salibiyya taking credit for the attack on the senator and telling the world that after striking abroad they were now bringing the fight and the cause to America.

By morning Jefferson’s photograph appeared in every newspaper in the United States, from broadsheet to tabloid, including front page above the fold in the
New York Times
. For Kate Sinclair, the publicity was priceless.

Forty-eight hours after the event itself, reading a script hastily written by Morrie Adler, the president announced that Richard Pierce Sinclair had been appointed to the vice presidency of the United States. By the end of the week it was the cover of
People
magazine and
Time
. Within ten days Patrick Henry Jefferson had a New York agent and slightly more than half a million dollars in the bank.

25

“This is a very, very, bad idea,” said Peggy. She and Holliday were sitting in the cab of the old pickup truck they’d borrowed from Harry Moonblanket two days before. The battered old F150 was parked across from a plain white bungalow on West Federal Street in Bedford Mills. It was typical of most of the homes in the working-class Virginia town: slightly run-down, in need of paint and sitting on a half-acre lot crusted with a thin layer of old snow. A pink flamingo was frozen in place on the front lawn and the large area in the rear showed the hard, lumpy ruts of a vegetable garden. A carport with a fiberglass roof had been tacked on to the right side of the house like an afterthought. Sitting under the green, corrugated sheet of plastic was a brand-new, jet-black Porsche Turbo S.

“It’s the only idea I have left,” said Holliday. He scratched at the heavy bristle on his cheeks and chin—his early attempt at a disguise. With the eye patch he looked quite frightening. “We can’t go back to the house in Georgetown, you can’t go back to Rafi and I can’t think of anyone else we can go to for help. We’ve got to figure this whole thing out by ourselves.”

“What good is this guy going to be?” Peggy asked. “I still don’t get it.”

“Neither do I,” answered Doc. “There’s something wrong about it, just like Brennan and Philpot and all the rest. This guy Jefferson was there. Maybe he saw something we missed. It’s worth a shot.”

“And if he turns around and blows the whistle on us?”

“Then we’re no worse off than we are right now,” said Holliday. “On the run with no place to go.”

The gun used to shoot the newly appointed Vice President of the United States had been a short-barreled Walther P22 semiautomatic pistol that had been purchased quite legally at a local Bedford Mills gun store. The identification provided by the purchaser had identified him as Theodore Douglas Trepanik, a resident of Bocock, Virginia, a double-wide trailer park suburb of Lynchburg. Further investigation had uncovered that Trepanik was employed as a technician for Falwell Aviation at the nearby Lynchburg Regional Airport.

As it turned out, Theodore Douglas Trepanik had passed away ten months previously and his trailer home in Bocock had been ransacked during the funeral. Although his wife, AnnieRuth Trepanik, had taken care to cancel all of her late husband’s credit cards, she hadn’t noticed that both his driver’s license and Social Security card were missing from his wallet. The wallet had been on his bedside table along with his keys and reading glasses on the night of the massive heart attack that killed him.

Subsequent to the shooting, investigators from the FBI and Homeland Security discovered that the assassin had been registered at the Bedford Mills Super 8, using the Trepanik identification. Searching the room they found a Kuwaiti passport in the name of Shamed Khalil Zubai, as well as a Dutch passport in the name of Ismael Aknikh. The Kuwaiti passport showed an entry into the United States four months previously while the Dutch passport showed an entry into JFK in New York only two weeks before.

On that basis it was assumed that the name on the Kuwaiti passport was an alias and that Ismael Aknikh was the man’s real name. According to the Dutch authorities Aknikh was thirty-two years old, born in Amsterdam of Moroccan immigrant parents. Both his parents were dead and he had no other known family in Amsterdam or anywhere else in the Netherlands. Beyond that the killer was a cipher, as was the group who took credit for the Sinclair shooting, as well as the assassination of the Pope: Jihad al-Salibiyya.

Ismael Aknikh and the Jihad al-Salibiyya were the fulfillment of Richard Sinclair’s most dire predictions: an extremist Muslim terrorist organization centered in the United States; a festering wound that up until the night of the shooting had gone unnoticed.

At a press conference held at Walter Reed hospital in Washington the day after the shooting Kate Sinclair stated unequivocally that the attempt on her son’s life was a call to action. All the intelligence, counterterrorist and federal police agencies, including Homeland Security, had failed to identify either Jihad al-Salibiyya or the threat that it represented. According to her, the attack was nothing less than an early warning of much worse to come, a clarion call to the American people and their government that another 9/11 was in the making. In closing Kate Sinclair then made her own ominous prediction: Jihad al-Salibiyya’s next attack would almost certainly come sooner rather than later.

“What if Jefferson is under surveillance?” Peggy asked nervously.

“Where?” Holliday laughed. “The street is empty, the houses are a hundred yards apart and there’s no one around. It’s too damn cold. There’s no place to hide around here and, besides, why would anyone want to put a newspaper photographer under surveillance?”

“So far we’ve had the CIA, the Secret Service, the Italian police and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police coming after us. Why not the Bedford Mills Police force?”

“Only one way to find out,” said Holliday. He zipped up his ski jacket, then climbed out of the car. Peggy followed, muttering under her steaming breath.

Holliday reached the rickety front steps and climbed up to the equally rickety stoop. The closed curtains on the front windows looked as though they’d been made from
Star Wars
sheets—tiny images of C3PO and R2D2 repeated endlessly. He glanced over at the Porsche. It was so new you could still see little scraps of the dealer’s label on the passenger’s side window. Give this Jefferson credit; he’d established his newfound wealth in record time. Holliday knocked on the door.

From inside the house he could hear the sound of a television blaring, the Brain telling his friend Pinky of yet another plan to take over the world. Hearing the Animaniac cartoon, Holliday realized that it was Saturday. Suddenly the door was jerked open by a man in red-and-blue pajamas, holding a half-eaten Pizza Pop in one hand. It smelled revolting and was oozing red sauce over the man’s hand. He was in his forties, with thin brown hair and an oval face pitted from adolescent acne, and was wearing heavy wire-framed spectacles. He had a small mouth and no chin at all.

“What?” said the man.

“I’d like to talk to you about the town hall meeting you covered a few nights back.”

“Screw off,” said the man. “I’m watching TV.” He slammed the door but Holliday managed to get his foot in first.

“It’s important,” said Holliday, trying to keep his voice even.

“I told you, screw off!” said the man, pushing as hard as he could against the door. Holliday reached into the pocket of his jacket and pulled out the ancient Beretta Storm that Brennan had lent him. He poked the heavy barrel through the space in the door, aiming the old automatic at the man’s midsection.

“Step inside the house,” said Holliday.

The man’s eyes widened behind the glasses and his hands shot up in the air, squeezing the contents of the Pizza Pop out onto his hand and arm. He stumbled backward into the house. Holliday followed. Peggy came last, shutting the door behind her.

“Is this a robbery?”

“No.”

“Who are you? All the money’s in the bank.”

“I told you it wasn’t a robbery.”

“Then what do you want?”

Holliday sighed. Back to square one.

“We want to know what went on at the town hall meeting.”

“Can I sit down?”

“Certainly,” Holliday said with a nod.

Jefferson’s living room was a slum. Newspapers were everywhere, Chinese take-out containers and pizza boxes were scattered around on tables and chairs, and the long, gold-colored couch had crumpled clothes draped over the back. He popped the empty shell of the Pizza Pop into his mouth, licked most of the goop off his hand and arm, then wiped off the rest with an old shirt hanging over the couch. He sat down. The television, a huge flat-screen on the opposite wall with equally massive speakers, blared out the Brain’s most famous expression: “Are you pondering what I’m pondering, Pinky?”

“Turn it off,” said Holliday, raising his voice over the sinister musings of the hairless mouse. Jefferson manipulated the remote and the Brain cut off in midponder.

“The town hall meeting,” prompted Holliday.

“The senator got shot. The shot made him vice president. He got lucky; I got lucky.”

“How many pictures did you take?”

“Lots.”

“What does that mean?”

“Maybe two hundred or so. It’s easy with digital.”

“What camera?” Peggy asked.

“Nikon D90.”

“How were you shooting? Single-frame or video?” The D90, Peggy knew, was one of the very few single-lens-reflex cameras capable of shooting something as complex as a full-length feature film. It had already been used to shoot more than one television commercial.

“I was shooting single frames in the beginning. Establishing stuff—you know, crowds, a few local big guys ’cause they want to feel important. You know. For the speech I went to video. That’s how I caught the shot so well, the one of the senator and his mom. I just isolated that single frame and sold it.”

“Where’s the rest?”

“On my computer.”

“Get it,” Holliday said.

The computer turned out to be a Sony Vaio Z with a gigantic 358-gigabyte hard drive. Peggy gingerly picked up the assorted garbage on the coffee table in front of the couch and carried it to the kitchen. She came back a moment later with a stricken look on her face.

“It’s a war zone in there,” she whispered to Holliday. “There are things
growing
in the sink and there’s a nest of little spiders in the cutlery drawer.”

“Fruit flies, too,” said Jefferson, overhearing her comment. “I got a real problem with them, as well. I don’t know where all the damn bugs come from.” He frowned. “Maybe I should call an exterminator or something.”

“Buy some Venus flytraps,” muttered Peggy

“Show me the pictures,” said Holliday.

Jefferson brought up a file and opened it. He began running through the pictures he’d taken. The first several dozen were taken from somewhere in the town hall parking lot and showed various individuals arriving. There was nothing of particular interest until Jefferson took up a position along with several other photographers in what had once been the orchestra pit. From that position he took a series of panoramic shots of the audience and then turned his attention up to the stage as Senator Sinclair appeared and took his place behind the podium.

“Go back,” said Peggy, looking over Jefferson’s shoulder. “Five frames or so.”

“Sure.” Jefferson clicked back through the pictures.

“There,” said Peggy, “there’s your man.” The photograph showed a man in his early thirties, blank-faced, white and beardless. He was dressed in chinos and a red nylon, quilted ski jacket, and was sitting on the far right of a middle aisle. He didn’t look anything like the classic, wild-eyed jihadist. He looked like he worked as a checker at a Piggly Wiggly store and Peggy said so.

“Just the kind of freak the senator’s been talking about,” said Jefferson. “He was right enough about that.”

“Run the pictures ahead,” said Holliday.

Jefferson did as he was told. Twenty frames further on Holliday stopped him. “This is the moment he gets hit.” In the photograph Sinclair was halfway through a clockwise pirouette, thrown backward away from the podium, almost pushed to the floor by the impact. The camera swerved, searching through the audience for the shooter, then went back to the prostrate senator, sprawled on the floor, left hand clutching his right shoulder.

“Back, slowly,” Holliday instructed.

Jefferson went back through the shots, back to the moment when Sinclair began to spin and fall.

“Stop.”

Jefferson stopped.

“There’s the problem,” said Holliday. “Our friend the Dutch Arab is sitting to the right of the stage. With Sinclair facing the audience he should have been hit on the left, not the right. And if he was shot from the right the force of the impact would have turned him counterclockwise, not clockwise. Not to mention the fact that this man Aknikh was sitting below the senator. The bullet’s trajectory would have been up, not down. He would have been pushed off his feet and backward by the shot, not straight down.”

“Sounds like a lot of Kennedy-conspiracy gobbledygook,” snorted Jefferson.

“A lot of that gobbledygook, as you call it, still hasn’t been logically answered,” Holliday said.

“So he wasn’t shot by Aknikh?” Peggy asked.

“He couldn’t have been,” answered Holliday. “He was definitely shot from above and from the left.”

“The balcony,” said Jefferson.

“What balcony?”

“There’s a balcony in the town hall. It’s used for storage now.”

“Then he wasn’t the shooter,” Peggy said. “The whole thing was a setup.”

“It looks that way.” Holliday nodded. He turned to Jefferson. “Who else has seen these photographs?”

“A guy from the FBI came around and said he had a warrant to impound them all as material evidence. He asked me if I had copies but I said no.”

“You lied?” Peggy asked.

“They’re my pictures, aren’t they?” Jefferson huffed.

“They may be your death warrant,” said Holliday. “If I were you I’d hop in that new Porsche of yours and get the hell out of town.”

“Why? I haven’t done anything wrong. I have my rights.”

“Maybe they’ll put that on your tombstone,” said Holliday. “The fact is, people in high places are laying in a cover-up and you and your pictures are a loose end. These people snip off loose ends without even thinking about it.”

“Take his advice,” said Peggy. “Pack your bags and run like hell.”

“Kate Sinclair had a script all along,” said Holliday as they drove away. “First the Pope, which gets the vice president to travel to Rome, then the VP gets killed and then her son plays the wounded martyr.”

“And now
he’s
the VP,” said Peggy.

“I’ve met Kate Sinclair,” said Holliday, his tone grim. “She’d never go to all this trouble to wind up settling for second-best. The script doesn’t have an ending . . . yet.”

They were less than a mile out of town when they were pulled over by a red-and-gold West Virginia State Police cruiser. Holliday waited for the inevitable; he had only his own identification and no papers for the old pickup truck. When they ran his name through the computers, all hell was going to break loose.