The Templar Cross

22

Al's uncle Paolo, Mario the cousin's father, had a twenty-four-foot Toyo trawler named Sofia that he used for fishing when he wasn't busy raising rabbits for the hotels. Uncle Paolo was perfectly happy to rent Holliday Sofia for a price as long as he promised faithfully to bring the boat and his American nephew back to him in one piece-emphasis on Sofia rather than the nephew, Uncle Paolo being a practical man, after all.

Peggy would have called Sofia "cute." To Al she was "smart." To Holliday she seemed just a little silly, almost a toy. The plywood semidisplacement hull looked like a lifeboat with a telephone booth perched on the back and was painted white with a nice sky blue stripe down the gunwales.

The forward hold, lined with zinc, was big enough to carry a hundred and forty cubic feet or a little more than a ton of shrimp, caught using what Al referred to as a single Dutch seine rig towed behind the boat at a depth of about eighty to a hundred feet along the muddy and sandy bottom of the offshore area between the islands.

A ton of shrimp with its inevitable by-catch of hake and juvenile bluefin tuna during the high season was just about enough to keep the Ponza hotels going for a single day of the lunchtime trade, so the local pescatori switched their favorite fishing grounds and times to share the wealth. It took Al a few hours to negotiate the grounds between Ventotene and the prison island, but by midafternoon, properly attired in jeans, fresh T-shirts and sneakers, they chugged out of Ponza Harbor in Sofia and headed east at a steady eight knots, the old 35-horsepower Perkins diesel coughing and belching happily as they chugged their way onto the open sea.

Three hours later, with the falling sun turning the slightly ruffled ocean to a flashing bronze, they raised Ventotene on the horizon. As they closed on the island Santo Stefano appeared just behind it, the high-walled citadel of the old Bourbon prison rising like a fortress on the craggy summit.

They puttered into the tiny rock-hewn harbor at Ventotene just as the sun was going down. It was a smaller version of the waterfront at Ponza: eighteenth-century buildings in pastel colors clinging to cliff terraces, crisscrossing alley stairways zigzagging back and forth.

There was a place for ferries to dock, disgorging tourists coming for alcoholic getaways and baking sun for a few days, a week, or maybe two. There were more pleasure craft in the harbor here than at Ponza; day cruisers, motor sailers and full-out glistening yachts outnumbered fishing boats like the Sofia by two to one at least.

Al found an old iron mooring ring in the seawall that ran around the harbor, hitched Sofia to it, then went in search of the harbor master to announce his arrival and show his credentials. Rafi sat moodily in the bows staring down at the oily water that slopped between the boats at anchor while Holliday and Tidyman made a show of moving around the pile of seine net in the stern, readying the boat for a day's fishing the following morning.

"Your young friend looks unhappy," said the Egyptian, glancing at Rafi as he worked.

"He's worrying about Peggy," answered Holliday. "So am I."

"I hope he realizes that this cannot be a rescue mission," said Tidyman. "This man Conti is sure to outnumber us. We can only do a reconnaissance, nothing more."

"He's frustrated," said Holliday. "He feels as though he's not doing enough to help. I know what's going through his head, believe me."

"That kind of frustration leads to foolish behavior," cautioned Tidyman. "It could get us all killed."

"What are you suggesting?" Holliday asked.

"Perhaps you should talk to him," suggested Tidyman.

"Why don't you?"

"Because I'm Egyptian and he's Israeli, among other things. There's too much history between our people, I'm afraid. A wall of mistrust."

"Maybe it's time to tear it down," replied Holliday.

Tidyman gave a brief, hollow laugh.

"Another day perhaps," he said quietly. "He doesn't strike me as being in the mood for reconciliation right now."

Massimo Conti's cruise appeared later that evening, all 1,300 horsepower burbling powerfully as she shouldered her way into a preferred berth the harbor master gave her closest to the promenade stairway.

"Cute," said Holliday, seated on deck with Al as the big boat docked.

"What's that?" Al said, smoking another Marlboro in the fading light.

"The name," said Holliday. "Disco Volante."

"Means Flying Saucer," translated Al.

"Largo's boat in Thunderball," said Holliday. "Our boy has a sense of humor."

As the evening spun into night Holliday watched as Conti and his friends from shore partied long and loud, the music swelling across the miniature harbor, intruding on the privacy of anyone within earshot, which likely meant the entire town. It seemed unlikely that anyone aboard would be in any shape for an early breakfast.

They left for the shrimping grounds at dawn, heading out of the narrow harbor along with half a dozen other boats, leaving the sleeping pleasure craft behind them along with the tightly shuttered sleeping town on the terraced heights above.

In the morning, with the sun no more than a hot pink slash on the eastern horizon, Al ran the little trawler back and forth in the narrow strait between Santo Stefano and Ventotene, using his fish-finding gear to troll for likely shoals of shrimp big enough to grace the tables of the hotels and restaurants back in Ponza. Crammed into the tiny little day cabin- galley belowdecks Holliday, Rafi and Tidyman pored over the charts of Santo Stefano Al had found for them the day before in the Ventotene harbor master's office.

The island was a fortress in and of itself, a volcanic plug of dark basalt half a mile in diameter. Jagged cliffs rose five hundred feet to a broad plateau covered in an oddly sinister sea of wild-flowers that broke on the yellow stone walls of the crumbling old prison like bright blue perfumed waves.

The prison was circular, four bleak tiers rising out of the volcanic rock, pierced with windows and doors, everything facing in to a central courtyard with a single guard tower in the middle, an elevated platform overseeing the inmates as they went about their business. There were no toilets, nor was there any running water. The only food was what the prisoners' families sent to them. There was no work or any kind of labor. Time was a wheel that eventually broke a man. Madness was a way of life.

The cells, each holding at least twenty men, were perpetually dark and the courtyard was in perpetual sun. If an inmate was stupid enough to try to escape there was nothing between him and the jagged cliff edge except the giant field of flowers and their sweet cloying scent. He could die in the darkness or die in the sun; the guards didn't care which. A life term on Santo Stefano was just a death sentence that took varying amounts of time to execute depending on how stubborn a man was.

Like the Chateau d'If in The Count of Monte Cristo there was only one way off the island for a prisoner: in a weighted shroud. There were two ways into the prison, however: a narrow switchback road that made its way up the slightly sloping western approaches to the plateau on which the prison loomed, or by following an almost impossibly steep goat track up the northern cliffs from a tiny gravel beach that all but vanished at high tide. The switchback road was visible from the prison if a guard was posted, and the goat track was virtually suicidal.

"There's no other way up," said Holliday, peering at the chart as they bobbed along in the lightly running morning sea. A seagull swooped and called, sensing the possibility of a meal. "It's the cliff path or nothing. Even at dusk they'd see us going up the road."

"What about the tide?" Tidyman asked. "It says on the chart that the beach is covered at least half the time."

"Al says he could drop us in the late afternoon, pick us up in the late evening, ten thirty or eleven. Next pickup wouldn't be until the following morning," Holliday answered.

"In other words, we'd be on our own if there was any trouble," grumbled Rafi.

"There is no fair play in this game, I'm afraid," said Tidyman. "Sometimes the cards are stacked against you."

"What's that supposed to mean?" Rafi asked hotly. "You backing out?"

"Not at all, Dr. Wanounou," said the Egyptian, holding up one placating hand. "I'm just pointing out that whatever we do will be dangerous."

"I'm aware of that," said Rafi. "But getting Peggy back is worth it."

"She may not even be there," cautioned Holliday. "She could be farther down the pipeline by now."

Rafi muttered something under his breath, then turned away and went back up on deck.

"You realize that your cousin may very well be dead," said Tidyman. "Especially if they have discovered who she is."

"Yes, I know that," Holliday said and nodded. "I'm still trying to figure out why they took her on the expedition in the first place. If the expedition was just a cover for an attempt to find the German gold, why prejudice everything by taking along an outsider?" Holliday shook his head wearily and rolled up the chart. "It doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense."

"No, it does not," replied Tidyman. "Unless they had no choice."

"Explain," said Holliday.

"An expedition without a photographer would have been suspect perhaps. Smithsonian magazine suggests a story; how could they reasonably decline? Miss Blackstock becomes the sacrificial lamb."

"I'm still not sure I buy it," said Holliday. "An American citizen held hostage by terrorists? That shines a pretty big light on these people. Would they have done that knowingly?"

Tidyman shrugged. "There is only one way to find out."

The hold of the Sofia filled to overflowing with tens of thousands of plump, squirming crustacea, Al swung the shallow-draft little trawler close in to shore, his actions hidden on the lee side of the island. As the carvel planking of the boat's almost flat bottom ground against the pebble beach, Holliday, Tidyman and Rafi dropped over the side and waded to the shore. Al would take his catch back to Ponza, a three-hour journey, offload, and then return to Santo Stefano under the cover of night, returning to the little strip of inhospitable shingle with the next low tide, guided by a flashlight signal from Holliday.

Superficially it seemed like a simple enough plan, but as Holliday knew it was the simplest plans that often went the furthest astray. As the three men began to climb the near-vertical track up the cliff he found his thoughts turning to the thousand and one unknowns that could turn their little outing into an unmitigated and deadly disaster. The higher they climbed, clinging to the sheer rock wall, the more exposed Holliday felt, and the stiff breeze plucking insistently at his clothing was like a sour omen of skeletal fingers trying to pull him off his tenuous perch. He silently chided himself for being superstitious and continued to climb.

Calves in agony, knees buckling, Holliday reached the top of the cliff more than an hour later, sweat staining his T-shirt and running in rivers down his forehead, dripping in stinging torrents into his eyes. He fell to his hands and knees, breath coming in ragged gasps, the perfume of the immense field of blue flowers thick in the air. Finally he sat up and opened the binocular case at his hip, bringing out the powerful glasses he'd borrowed from Al.

A football field away the high walls of the horseshoe-shaped prison stood before him, windows and doorways peering blindly at him, empty holes in the old crumbling stone. The sun was level with the sea, turning the old ruins the color of old gold and deepening the shadows. There was no sound except the sighing of the breeze across the field, gently wafting the flowers and the dry screams of the pallid swifts that darted like flitting bats in and out of the ruins. Nothing moved and it seemed that for an instant the world held its breath. Hot and tired as he was, Holliday felt a sudden chill run down his spine.

He'd never thought of himself as being much of a believer in the paranormal, but every once in a while he found himself in places where he could have sworn the fabric of time and place had somehow worn thin and the past found itself uncomfortably close to the present and the future.

Each time he visited Paris and stood on the Champs-Elysees he inevitably heard the echo of Nazi boots goose-stepping on the cobbles, and standing on Burnside's Bridge in Antietam, Maryland, he swore he could hear the roar of cannons and the screams of twenty thousand dying men whose blood stained the muddy waters of the creek below, all in a single day.

"You feel it, don't you?" Tidyman said, flopping down beside him, panting.

"Yes," answered Holliday.

"An evil place," agreed the gray-haired Egyptian, peering across the open field to the ruins. "Four hundred years of pain and suffering leaves its mark, I think."

"I think you're right," said Holliday.

"What are you two old men going on about?" Rafi asked, joining them.

"You're the archaeologist-you should feel it the most," said Holliday.

"Feel what?" Rafi said.

"Time," said Tidyman.

"Superstitious nonsense," scoffed Rafi. A pair of darting swifts screeched like fishwives overhead and Rafi looked up, startled by the sudden sound.

"There's no one here," said Tidyman quietly. "It's empty. I can feel it."

"We can't be sure," said Rafi.

"Let's check it out while we've still got time," suggested Holliday. "If Conti comes, it'll be just before dark, guaranteed.

They walked across the empty field of wildflowers, listening and watching for any sound or sign of movement. There was nothing. They bypassed the ruins of an old wall marking the original prison dating back to Roman times and continued on in the dying sunlight, finally ducking through one of the empty arches into the Bourbon compound. Still nothing.

They climbed a few rough steps cut out of the bedrock and reached the inner courtyard. It was laid out like an ancient monastery, three arched galleries running in a circle, each gallery with cell doors running off it, the fourth tier buried in the old foundations for prisoners doomed to solitary confinement for whatever reason. Four evenly spaced and enclosed square stairways connected one tier to the next around the horseshoe.

In the center of the courtyard the oddly ornate guard tower rose, looking like a belfry without a bell, its dome capped by an iron crucifix long bent and rusted to a shapeless chunk of crusted metal.

"The Mafia was born in places like this," said Holliday, looking around. "Communism, too."

"How's that?" Tidyman asked, interested.

"The Bourbons put all their rotten eggs in one rotten basket," said Holliday. "Put that many Freemasons and revolutionaries together and you invariably get revolution. The Bastille gave you the French Revolution; Attica gave you the rise of Black Power. During World War Two the Germans put all their most dangerous prisoners into Stalag Luft Three P.O.W. Camp and you got the Great Escape."

"I don't think there was ever any great escape from this place," said Tidyman.

"None of which has anything to do with finding Peggy," said Rafi.

The three men split up and began checking the cells, going from tier to tier. All Holliday saw were a few empty beer bottles, the remains of a small fire, and most bizarre, a red-hot water bottle missing its plug. As he searched, something niggled at the back of his mind and finally he figured out what it was: none of the cell windows still had their bars. They had been methodically removed, wrenched from their crumbling enclosures, leaving only gaping stone.

Half an hour later, with the evening light fading fast, Holliday met with Tidyman at the foot of the main gallery.

The Egyptian sighed. He picked up a pebble from among the weeds in the courtyard and tossed it against one crumbling wall.

"There's nothing here, no sign of anyone. We're wasting our time. Perhaps our American taxi driver was spinning tall tales."

From the middle tier Rafi whispered harshly, his voice urgent.

"Somebody's coming!"

They ran across the courtyard to one of the enclosed stairways and climbed upward. They joined Rafi under one of the archways on the second-tier gallery and he led them into the musty interior of one of the old communal cells. Keeping well within the deep shadows they looked out through the empty cell window. They faced southeast, looking down the sloping length of the little island to the sea. At anchor, perhaps two hundred yards from the shore, was the sleek white shape of Massimo Conti's yacht, Disco Volante. On the zigzag path that climbed the cliff Holliday could see a little group trudging upward. He lifted the binoculars and fiddled with the focus.

"I think it's Peggy," whispered Holliday, not quite believing it. His cousin was walking between two muscular-looking armed men. Conti and another man in conversation walked behind them. Conti was dressed in shorts and a T-shirt. The man with him was dressed in a dark suit with a stark white collar. A priest? Peggy appeared to be unharmed but she looked terribly tired, her usually bright features drawn and haggard.

"Let me see!" Rafi hissed. Holliday handed him the glasses.

Rafi swore.

"It is her!" he breathed. "The bastard's had her on that boat all this time!"

"But why bring her here?" Tidyman asked.

"It doesn't matter!" Rafi said furiously. "I'll kill the son of a bitch!"

"Those guards are both wearing shoulder rigs," said Holliday. "They'd kill you first."

Rafi swung the glasses a little to one side.

"The man speaking with Conti. When they announced the expedition they had his picture in Archaeology magazine. That's Charles-Etienne Brasseur, the expedition leader, from the Biblical Archaeology School in Jerusalem."

"The man who went after the gold?" Holliday asked. He took the glasses back from Rafi and focused on the group again. "What on earth is he doing here? And what is he doing with Peggy?"

"Listen!" Tidyman said. In the distance they could hear the distinct whickering sound of an approaching helicopter. A big one.

"What the hell is going on?" Holliday said. He watched as the group reached the top of the zigzag track and paused. The helicopter came in low out of the west and thundered over the top of the old prison enclosure. Dust blew up in swirling clouds as the big machine came in overhead.

It settled slowly onto the broad, slightly sloping field like some giant insect, the flowers bending beneath the powerful downdraft of the five-bladed rotors. It was a big Sikorsky SH-3, the one they called the Sea King. The livery was white with a broad blue stripe around the midline. There were patches taped over the places where the roundels and service name would ordinarily be but the bird was clearly military. There was no visible weaponry; it was a VIP transport. But where was it from and where was it going?

The Sea King had a range of more than six hundred miles; not far but enough to put it down from the coast of Spain to the Black Sea and all of continental Europe in between. With a long-range fuel tank a chopper like that could take you halfway to Moscow. A needle in a hundred haystacks.

The engines cycled down to an idling whine and the rotors continued to whirl lazily. A doorway opened in the hull just behind the cockpit and someone inside lowered a short set of stairs. Massimo Conti and his group came forward a few paces, then stopped again. Peggy looked around blearily as though she was trying to get her bearings. Holliday felt a lurch in his stomach, his heart going out to her, but he knew there was nothing he could do.

Beside him Rafi made a small sound in his throat and tore the binoculars out of Holliday's grip. Someone stepped down from the helicopter and waved at Conti, standing a few yards away. The man was tall and completely bald. Rafi swung the glasses away from the group, focusing on the new arrival. Suddenly he dropped the glasses away from his eyes and stared blindly out through the dark opening of the cell window. The blood drained visibly from his face.

"What's wrong?" Holliday said.

"It's him," whispered Rafi, real horror in his face. "The bald one. I'd recognize him anywhere. The guy who stole the Crusader scroll from us. The one who had me beaten half to death a year ago in Jerusalem. It's him. He's here."

Rafi handed over the binoculars. Holliday looked, seeing the man for the first time. Rafi's beating had come at the hands of the same people who'd tried to kill Holliday and Peggy in a back alley in Old Jerusalem on the same night a year ago. Call them what you wanted, Black Templars, La Sapiniere, Sodalitium Pianum, Organum Sanctum, the Instrument of God, it was all the same, and then and there he knew where the big white helicopter had come from and where it was going: its destination was Rome. The Vatican.