The Templar Conspiracy (18 page)

“Don’t you mean Social Security Numbers?” Peggy asked.

“Don’t make that mistake at the embassy in Paris if anybody happens to question you, which they won’t. Social Security is American; Social Insurance is Canadian.”

“But we’re not going to Paris,” Peggy argued.

“Oh yes, you are,” said Paddy Philpot.

With the exception of their passports, they had all the documents they needed by two in the afternoon. As a bonus Pyx had thrown in two valid Bank of Nova Scotia Visa cards in their new names, each with a ten-thousand-dollar limit that, according to the Irishman, would somehow be skimmed from the huge Canadian bank’s vast stream of invisible wireless transfers that pinged off satellites around the world each day.

They spent most of their day at Le Vieux Four drinking ice cold Sangano Blonde beer, nibbling on cheese and pâté and listening to Paddy Philpot spin tales about his old cloak-and-dagger days. Holliday could almost forget why they were in this beautiful place. Almost.

In the early afternoon, documents in hand, they thanked Pyx for his hospitality and the speed and quality of his work, then climbed back into the Mercedes and headed down the mountain to the valley below. Finding the auto route, they made the sixty-mile trip to Lyon in a little over an hour and Philpot dropped them off in front of the modern Part-Dieu railway station.

“There are fast trains all the time. The trip to Paris takes about two hours. You should be all right. You remember the name of the hotel I told you about?”

“Hotel Normandie. Rue de la Huchette between Rue du Petit Pont and the Boulevard Saint-Michel on the Left Bank,” said Holliday, repeating Philpot’s instructions.

“Good man.” The CIA analyst smiled.

“We owe you for the passports,” said Holliday grudgingly. “I haven’t forgotten, you know. We’ll pay you back.”

“Think nothing of it, Doc. Consider yourself back on the Company payroll.”

“What about you?” Holliday asked.

“I have some people to see back in Prague. But we’ll meet up again back in the States.” He took a small black cell phone out of his pocket and handed it to Holliday. “I’ll call you.” He smiled again, rolled up the window and drove off.

Holliday and Peggy turned, crossed the broad sidewalk and went into the low-ceilinged modern terminus. They bought a pair of first-class tickets on the next highspeed train to Paris, a brand-new TGV Duplex double-decker with big, airplane-style seats, lots of legroom and a top speed of 186 miles per hour.

They boarded the train, found their seats and settled in for the relatively short journey. So far they had seen nothing suspicious, but without passports and only forged documents to identify themselves they both felt vulnerable. The train was packed, mostly with tourists of various nationalities on their way back to Paris, but they had seats together and no one paid them any attention.

The train headed smoothly out of the station, right on time, and a few minutes later they were gathering speed as they raced through the suburbs of the big French city. Neither one of them had spoken since leaving Philpot at the entrance to the station.

“You want something to eat?” Holliday asked. He had taken the aisle seat, giving Peggy the window.

“No, thanks.”

“Drink?”

“No, I’m not thirsty,” said Peggy, shaking her head. “Maybe later.”

“Yeah, maybe later,” said Holliday awkwardly. Another moment passed.

“What do you really know about Philpot?” Peggy asked finally.

The train began to sway and vibrate slightly as they hit the open countryside and continued to gain speed. “I know he and Pesek got us out of a lot of trouble yesterday. He’s arranged for passports today. Stuff we couldn’t have done ourselves.”

“Like some kind of guardian angel—is that it?”

“I’m not sure.”

“You ever wonder whose side he’s on?” She frowned. “He could be part of Sinclair’s scheme. He could be part of the rogue group within the Agency. Lies inside lies inside lies.”

“Yes.”

“Well?”

“I can’t give you an answer because I don’t know. I only know what he’s done for us so far.”

“There’s something wrong with the world when you suspect that
everybody’s
out to get you.”

Holliday was silent for a moment. He stared at the striped fabric and the pull-down table on the seat ahead.

“You ever watch a TV show or read a book and come to a place where you stop and ask yourself, why don’t they just go to the cops?”

“Sure,” Peggy said. “It’s like in a horror movie when the girl goes down into the dark basement and everybody but her knows she should turn and run.”

“But if she did, the movie would end right there,” agreed Holliday. “That’s where we are,” he went on. “We’re at the place where the movie should just end, because if we had any brains we’d run to the cops.”

“But we can’t,” said Peggy.

“What are you getting at?”

“Philpot’s keeping the movie going.” She paused. “And you can GPS us off that phone with the right equipment.”

“So?” Holliday asked.

“Why is he doing it?” Peggy said. “He and Pesek’s people save our bacon after they kidnapped us, and now he gets us passports. He wants us back in the middle of it all. Why?” She paused. “Is he setting us up like Brennan did?”

“That thought had crossed my mind,” Holliday said abjectly. “But what are we supposed to do about it now?” He turned and looked at Peggy. “I should send you back to Rafi in Jerusalem.”

“Don’t be so retro, Doc. And besides, Rafi’s not in Jerusalem; he’s in Ethiopia or somewhere, looking for some lost Roman Legion or King Solomon’s Mines or something. And, anyway, I wouldn’t go. You need me.” Peggy looked out the window, then back at Holliday. “So, what do we do now?”

“I might have one more card to play,” Holliday said thoughtfully.

“It better be an ace,” said Peggy.

Kate Sinclair was over the mid-Atlantic on her way back to the United States for her son’s formal investiture as vice president when her companion’s satellite phone pinged insistently. Excusing himself, Mike Harris took the call. He listened for less than a minute and then ended the call.

“Anything important?” Sinclair asked, smoking a cigarette and sipping a glass of her own red wine.

“Pyx reporting in as you requested. He’s given everyone passports and Visa cards. The Visas have GPS locators under the hologram, just as he said. We can find them anytime we want.”

“Good,” said the old woman. “I always knew bribing that man was a good idea. Knowing who’s looking for false IDs can be quite useful at times.”

30

Holliday and Peggy picked up their passports at the Canadian Embassy in Paris, took a cab to Charles de Gaulle Airport and arrived in New York twenty-three hours after boarding the TGV in Lyon. Surprisingly, everything had gone without a hitch. The passport officer at the embassy gave them smiles as he handed them their phony passports, the cab driver to Charles de Gaulle talked about how much he had enjoyed a recent trip to New York to visit his married sister in Brooklyn, and the food on the Air France jumbo was terrific. The security people at JFK barely gave them a second look even though they didn’t have any luggage, and they waved down a limo heading into the city on their first attempt. They booked two adjoining rooms at the newly refurbished Gramercy Park Hotel and by lunchtime they were in the Rose Bar, snacking on Kobe beef burgers with hand-cut fries and green tomatoes.

“So who exactly is Max Kessler?” Peggy asked, dipping a fry into a blob of ketchup. “And why are we going to see him?”

“He’s kind of like a shadow Henry Kissinger,” answered Holliday. “He was a geek before the word was invented. An information freak, a people collector, a scholar, a schmoozer. On top of that he’s been a private counsel and intelligence adviser to the last four presidents.”

“I’ve never heard of him.” Peggy frowned. She popped the fry into her mouth and chewed appreciatively.

“That’s the point,” said Holliday. “He’s like the phantom of the opera, always the behind-the-scenes guy.”

“Why so secretive?”

“I think it has something to do with his father.”

“Who was his father?”

“An SS Colonel, Rhinehard Gehlen’s executive assistant.”

“You lost me. Rhinehard who?”

“Gehlen. A Nazi spymaster in charge of their Soviet desk. He traded his information to the OSS in return for him and his family being brought to the States under Operation Paperclip. He worked for the CIA for decades. He went back to Germany and became head of West German Intelligence until the late seventies. Hugo Von Kessler stayed here along with his wife and his son. Max just carried on the family tradition. There are still whispers about Max’s access to secret information but nobody really cares as long as he comes up with the goods.”

“How do you know him?”

“We helped each other out a few times over the years,” said Holliday vaguely. “The point is, Max Kessler knows everything and everybody when it comes to the CIA and anything to do with intelligence. If Philpot’s playing us or Tritt is involved with some kind of plot he’ll know about it.”

Max Kessler occupied what had once been Boris Karloff’s gloomy apartment on the sixth floor of the Dakota, overlooking Central Park. The building was famous for being the location used in
Rosemary’s Baby
and the place where John Lennon was assassinated.

Kessler’s apartment had a living room, a dining room converted into an office, two bedrooms and an enormous kitchen. There were an awful lot of dark wood paneling, crystal chandeliers and heavy Victorian furniture that was brought over from England by the container load and sold as “important antiques” during the fifties and sixties. There were doilies and dusty-looking Persian carpets everywhere and bad paintings of horses and battles from forgotten wars on expensively papered walls. It could have been the home of somebody’s dowager aunt.

Kessler looked like an undertaker. He greeted them at the door, wearing a three-piece, dark blue pinstripe suit, a blue-and-gold Harvard Law silk tie and expensive-looking, tasseled shoes. He wore round horn-rims balanced on a long nose that mimicked his overlong chin. The cheeks were a little sunken, and his forehead arched up into thinning steel gray hair swept straight back in shiny Prussian perfection. The eyes behind the glasses were like lumps of coal, and when he smiled a greeting it looked as though the slight movement of his thin lips would crack his entire face like a boiled egg.

He led them into the small living room and gestured toward a sofa upholstered in black and yellow stripes that might have suited someone’s grandmother. He lowered himself into a tall-backed armchair upholstered in the same fabric, tenting his fingers like an old-fashioned schoolmaster surveying a roomful of students. Peggy suddenly realized the role he was playing: it was a combination of Basil Rathbone and Jeremy Brett doing Sherlock Holmes. When he spoke he even had a faintly British accent, when by rights it should have been German.

“It has been some time, Colonel. I was rather surprised by your telephone call.” He smiled thinly. “Presumably it is a matter of some urgency.”

“That remains to be seen.”

“Before we begin, there is the matter of the telephone given to you by our mutual acquaintance Mr. Philpot.”

“I took out the SIM card and the battery.” Holliday said.

“A wise precaution. The use of GPS transponders in most telephones these days is a matter of some concern to me. It seems faintly Orwellian. A bit too
1984
for my tastes.”

“What’s your take on Philpot?” Holliday asked, getting to the point.

“He could easily be playing both sides.”

“But both sides of
what
?” Peggy asked.

“You were involved in that affair with Rex Deus and the Sinclair woman some time back, were you not, Colonel?”

“I didn’t think it was common knowledge,” answered Holliday, surprised.

“Common knowledge isn’t my stock-in-trade,” said Kessler, his voice dry.

“What about Sinclair?” Holliday said.

“A murdered Pope. A priest and his male lover found dead on a back road in suburban Virginia. Two dead Blackhawk Security operatives in an apparent fatal automobile accident in Rock Creek Park, but with a dozen bullet holes in the remains of the immolated vehicle. An assassinated vice president. A national warrant for your arrest in Italy; an incident at the Canadian border involving a man and woman who match your descriptions. An assassination attempt by an unknown terrorist group on a United States senator, a murdered photographer burned to death in his new Porsche, and finally a federal warrant here, which begs the question of how you returned to the United States without alerting the authorities. You and Ms. Blackstock have cut quite a swath in the past week, Colonel.”

“You left out the part about being kidnapped and flown to an American black site in the Czech Republic,” said Peggy.

“Ah yes, the melodramatic rescue by
Pane
Pesek and his little ninja crew. I didn’t think it was worth mentioning.”

“Easy for you to say,” snorted Peggy.

“I am a spider in a web, Ms. Blackstock. I stay in my little lair and morsels of information eventually make their way to me. Sometimes the morsels add up to a tasty meal; sometimes they do not.”

“And in this case?” Holliday asked.

“In this case they add up to Kate Sinclair, which in turn leads us to her Rex Deus compatriot in the Central Intelligence Agency.”

“And who might that be?”

“Michael P. Harris, deputy director of operations. The
P
stands for Pierce. He’s Kate Sinclair’s brother. As I said, crumbs of fact that sometimes go unnoticed.”

“That could explain a great deal,” murmured Holliday, trying to piece it together.

“Or nothing at all,” replied Kessler. He smiled. “In this case, however, it explains almost everything.”

“Do tell,” said Peggy.

“By this time, at least according to Mr. Philpot, you are aware of Madame Sinclair’s ambitions for her son, and thus for a Rex Deus hegemony in the United States. But Kate Sinclair needs more leverage. Having her son receive a flesh wound from a so-called terrorist and playing second lead in the White House isn’t good enough to push her agenda over the top. I would suggest that she needs a bigger bang, and she needs it to come soon.”

“Who, what, where and when?” Holliday said. “Those are the missing crumbs, as you call them.”

“The who is simple,” said Kessler. “Kate Sinclair can do nothing on her own and neither can her son—not that he has the sense. No. The who is definitely Mr. Harris. As to the rest—look for an event or a person, a time or a place where havoc would reap the most benefit. And look for it soon. Time is of the essence. It must come before our new vice president leaves the news cycle. Put Mr. Harris in such a place at such a time and you will have your answer.”

“Any ideas?” Holliday asked.

“One or two,” said Kessler, smiling thinly.