Red Templar

36

Genrikhovich stepped into the treasure house, set the big lantern down and turned it up to its fullest light, revealing a room born from the sweat and blood and hearts and hands of ten thousand toiling artisans from the mountains of the Himalayas to the great Horn of Africa. It was large and domed, and surrounded with Palladian columns, steps of granite leading down to a floor that Plato might have debated on, or where the great Sophocles might have set his Oedipus Rex, or his Antigone.

But the floor was covered knee-deep in treasures, goblets, coins, bars and bolts of cloth so old they had rotted away to rich dust, and the steps had been turned into shelves full of coins and bullion, silver and gold jewelry crusted with gems of all kinds, from ropes of huge pearls to diamonds the size of ice cubes and emeralds the size of green apples.

There were carved ivory elephant tusks, a life-size pair of black onyx leopards being held in check by golden chains grasped in the fist of a carved Nubian slave that might have come from some ancient Egyptian tomb. On one side a stuffed crocodile with amethyst eyes was in full-scale combat with a full-size Russian bear. On the other side turquoise hummingbirds hung from the silver branches of a plum tree blossoming with pale Ceylonese sapphires.

On the cases set along the walls between the high pillars were scrolls wrapped in gold and capped with chased silver. There were manuscripts bound in inlaid horn and every form of precious metal. There were enormous tomes, their leather spines as worked and carved as the backs of ancient dinosaurs, and some volumes slim enough to be held in a child’s hand and bound in the thin, translucent mottled shells of unborn tortoises. This was Ivan the Terrible’s great library, saved from the vandal pillaging of Constantinople almost six hundred years ago, marking the end of an empire that had lasted since the time of Christ.

Holliday shivered, hearing the last words of the big, sad-eyed monk Helder Rodrigues as he lay dying in the rain under a dark, troubled sky: Too many secrets. Too many secrets.

“Poryodok zhar-ptitsa,” whispered Genrikhovich, staring across the high-domed room. He began to walk like a man hypnotized, humming softly under his breath.

“What’s he saying?” Holliday whispered.

“The Order of the Firebird. The Phoenix,” answered Eddie, keeping his voice low. “?Querido Dios!?Esta cantando el saga Krasny!” said the Cuban, tears suddenly welling from his big brown eyes and running down his cheeks.

“The what?” Holliday said, stunned at the reaction it was having on his friend.

“My mother sang it to me when I was a little boy,” said Eddie. “When my father was dying in the hospital of cancer I held him in my arms and he asked me to sing it to him, and I did, but I could not remember the words and he died.” The Cuban was openly sobbing now, as though some long-forgotten dam of emotion had burst.

“I’m sorry, friend, so very sorry,” Holliday said. It was as though the man were being ripped apart by the memory of his dying father. His eyes on Genrikhovich, Holliday could now see where he was going: a granite podium like the one outside, this one with a sword sheathed in silver hanging over the stone edge of the plinth from a fine gold mesh belt.

Holliday immediately recognized the sword by the simple, wire-wrapped hilt identical to the sword his uncle Henry had kept hidden in his house in Fredonia, New York, for more than half a century. That sword had previously been owned by Adolf Hitler and kept at his mountain retreat at Berchtesgaden in Bavaria. Now, Holliday could see, this was the last of the four swords sent out from Castle Pelerin by the dwarf swordsmith Alberic in the Holy Land, warning the Templars of their grisly destiny. This was Octanis, Sword of the South.

The front of the plinth the sword hung on was carved with a great fiery bird rising up out of a bed of flames-the phoenix. On the top of the podium and looking remarkably familiar was a large, ornate box. The box looked familiar because it was identical to every illustration or copy of it Holliday had seen since he was a child in Sunday school, right up to the one hidden away in a Pentagon warehouse in Steven Spielberg’s famous film.

It was four feet long and two and a half feet wide, the entire box covered in sheet gold and topped by two angels, wings stretched toward each other, wing tips touching, also in gold. The sides of the box were covered in ornate designs, and two poles were permanently fixed to its base for transport. By most accounts it held the shattered stone tablets Moses had smashed at the foot of Mount Sinai, but occasionally was thought to include Aaron’s rod and a jar of manna from heaven, depending on which book and which translation of the Old Testament you were reading. It was, beyond a shadow of a doubt, none other than the Ark of the Covenant.

The original Ark was thought to have been hidden in a variety of places, from a Templar Knight’s ancestral home in Warwickshire, England, to a lake in Ethiopia, returned to Mount Sinai, now known as Mount Horeb, hidden inside a hill in Ireland, the Languedoc region of France and even hidden away in a museum in Harare, the capital city of the Republic of Zimbabwe. To Holliday’s knowledge no one had even once suggested that it had rested under the Kremlin for the last few hundred years, although it made a certain amount of sense when you considered the origin of most of Czar Ivan’s riches.

Genrikhovich reached the podium, grasped the wings of the angels on the peaked cover of the ark and pulled upward with a jerk. The top of the box came up and off without any problem. For a single second some idiot part of Holliday’s brain expected a ray-gun beam of brilliant light to zap out of the box and melt Genrikhovich’s face like a wax candle, but nothing happened. The Russian simply set the top aside and reached inside.

A moment later he removed a large jeweled slipcase made out of beaten gold. From inside he withdrew a simple leather-bound volume about eighteen inches high, a foot and a half wide and three or four inches thick. He laid it carefully on the surface of the podium, sweeping the top of the box to the floor, where it split into several pieces. He turned back the cover and stared. An instant later he crowed like a rooster at dawn.

“I have it!” he screeched. “I have it now!” The Russian did a gruesome little jig, his lank hair plastered to his temples as trickles of sweat coursed down his face. He took off his spectacles, peering closely at the text, then put them on again, fumbling as he hooked the arms of the glasses over his ears.

“It is in Aramaic, Holliday. Can you read Aramaic? No, of course you can’t, but it doesn’t matter. I don’t need you anymore-or them, for that matter. Or your silly notebook; they can have it all!” He crowed again, a terrible shriek that dissolved into convulsive giggles.

“You know what it says, you poor fool of an American? You know what the title of this book is? No? Well, I’ll tell you. It says, ‘The Gospel of Yeshua ben Yusef.’ You know who he was, at least, surely.”

Holliday knew. He stood stunned beside his weeping friend. Yeshua ben Yusef had been Christ’s name as a man. If the book Genrikhovich held in his hands was literally Christ’s own words as written by himself in the years before his death-or, Holliday thought, after his supposed crucifixion-if they were the words of a man and not a god, then those words would have more real power than anything dreamed up for a Hollywood movie or in the beakers of horrors at the Almaty Biological Weapons Facility in Kazakhstan, so short of money now that they kept their supplies of anthrax in old coffee cans.

“Come!” Genrikhovich offered generously, waving his hand in Holliday’s direction. “Leave the crying nigger and I’ll show you.”

“?Basta ya!”Enough! Eddie roared. “?Es suficiente, pedazo de mierda inutil ruso!”

Holliday didn’t have any time at all to react.

Tears still streamed down Eddie’s cheeks, but his sorrow had turned to rage. He came out of his crouching position on the floor like a sprinter leaving his blocks, a deep guttural groan growing in his throat like some enraged animal finally, at long last, unleashed. He vaulted over the chests of treasure, heading for the Russian, who now stood frozen, wide eyed with fear as the big Cuban thundered toward him, blood in his eyes.

“Eddie! No!” Holliday yelled, taking off after his friend. Genrikhovich suddenly remembered the Tokarev and fumbled for it on the podium, horrified when he couldn’t find it. Eddie was getting closer by the second, the growl had now grown to a full-fledged bellow of sustained demonic fury.

“?Basta ya!” he yelled again.

Genrikhovich dropped to his knees and scrabbled through the broken pieces of the Ark on the floor. He found the pistol and stumbled to his feet just as Eddie reached him. He pulled the trigger but nothing happened.

No round in the chamber; amateur’s mistake, thought Holliday as he charged after Eddie. Lucky.

Eddie tackled the man shoulder-high and they went down, bringing the rest of the Ark with them in a cascade of splintering wood and thin gold sheeting. The Russian made a screeching sound and then the pistol went off with a muffled roar.

“Eddie!” Holliday yelled hoarsely.

Genrickovich clambered to his feet, the Tokarev held shakily in one hand. A lens of his glasses was shattered, and there was blood all over the front of his shirt. He aimed the gun downward and hauled back on the hammer. “Die, you black bastard!”

Holliday didn’t hesitate for a second. He slid Octanis from its golden sheath, raised it above his head and brought it down in a single deadly blow. The brilliantly worked Damascus blade did exactly as it was meant to do, slicing down through skin, flesh, muscle sinew and bone, taking off the Russian’s arm at the shoulder. Genrikhovich’s arm, Tokarev still clenched in the fist, cartwheeled up and away in a fountain spray of arterial blood that drenched everything, including the book open on the podium. The arm finally landed somewhere in the middle of the chamber with a thump and a clatter.

“My arm,” said Genrikhovich almost calmly, staring at the end of his shoulder. The spray was now a pumping mass of veins and arteries that squirmed like trapped snakes with their heads lopped off. “My arm is gone,” said the Russian, his voice sounding a little surprised and confused. “You’ll have to put it back on.”

Genrikhovich took two steps forward and tried to grip the podium with both hands to support himself. Unfortunately one of the hands was no longer there.

“Please?” Genrikhovich said, and then fell down hard. Holliday had seen wounds like this in Vietnam and Afghanistan-men whose nervous systems continued on for a few seconds when by rights they should have been dead. Holliday looked down at the body on the floor. He was dead now. His arm had pretty much stopped bleeding.

Holliday crouched down, attending to Eddie. He rolled the man over on his back and saw a large red stain on the lower left quadrant of his chest. It wasn’t sucking and there was no bloody froth on his lips, so it wasn’t a lung. Spleen or kidney, maybe. Not as bad as a lung but bad enough.

“Can you walk?”

“I think so.” Eddie nodded weakly.

“Hang on for a second.” He turned, slipped off Genrikhovich’s gory backpack, then stuffed the book inside it. He shrugged on the backpack and eased himself upward, one arm around Eddie’s armpit, the other holding his elbow. After a few seconds the Cuban stood, a little unsteadily.

“Okay?” Holliday asked.

“Okay.” Eddie nodded and they headed for the door. They reached it and stepped into the outer chamber. In the distance above them Holliday could hear the sound of boot heels on stone steps.

“Great,” he muttered. It was probably the Spetsnaz team they’d almost run into earlier. Not that it made much difference now; going back the way they’d come was too long and too difficult anyway, and he had to get Eddie into a doctor’s care as quickly as possible. He helped the Cuban across the chamber to the iron gate leading into the Saint Basil’s tunnel and booted it in. The gate tore away easily on rusted-out hinges and the two men stepped into the dark passage.