The Templar Conspiracy

20

The Maine Mall is a 1,200,000 square foot sprawling shopping complex in the southern part of the city of Portland and is anchored by JCPenney, Sears, Best Buy, Macy's and Sports Authority. It contains another 140 shops and services, including a food court and several sit-down family restaurants. It is the largest shopping mall in Maine, and more major drug deals are completed here than in any other place in the state, mostly in the food court, particularly the McDonald's section. The food court is located on the main level at the western, or JCPenney, end of the mall.

Today the blank-faced Chinese group was at Arby's and the Vietnamese were chowing down on Big Macs. There were four of each, but the principals were obvious. One Vietnamese, a short man in his early twenties, was eating nothing and neither was his Chinese alter ego in the seating section next door. The noise level was deafening, like a Niagara Falls of chatter. Most people avoided sitting near the young Asian men in their black leather jackets, slicked oily hair and opaque or reflective sunglasses. Their privacy was guaranteed.

At an unseen signal the Chinese leader got up from his place, accompanied by one bodyguard. He slipped into the booth occupied by the Vietnamese man. He, too, had a single bodyguard with him. They spoke for a moment, probably in English, although William Tritt couldn't be sure. He watched from just outside Ben amp; Jerry's as the meeting came to an end and the two men shook hands. It was the handshake that gave it away, of course. Hand shaking was distinctly non-Asian and rarely practiced by them except with whites. Ergo it had a purpose, and if you were watching as closely as William Tritt was you would have seen it: two sets of car keys being exchanged. It was the perfect pass over and any narcotics agent arresting either group at this point would find no evidence of any sort of drugs on the men. The keys would have no identifying tags and no electronic beepers. Checking all of the thousands of vehicles in the enormous parking lots surrounding the mall on three sides would be impossible.

The Vietnamese were almost invariably the buyers in situations like this, so when the little party broke up Tritt followed the four Chinese, who were probably collecting the cash. Tritt had no interest in the drugs, whatever they were. They headed for the northwest exit.

The parking lot was a crisscross maze of snow piles and narrow, half-cleared paths. It was snowing now, the blustery wind off the nearby ocean cutting visibility as the fat flakes whirled and danced. The only people in the lot were hurrying either to or from their vehicles. The car was a tan Chevy Impala from the last decade. The leader of the small Chinese group put the key in the trunk lock and opened it. All four men leaned inward to inspect the contents.

A firm believer in simple solutions, Tritt removed the.50-caliber Desert Eagle from the brand-new black nylon sports bag he carried in his left hand, then screwed on the suppressor he took from the pocket of his newly purchased ski jacket from Sears. He had already snapped on surgical gloves as he walked along behind the four Chinese in the mall. From fifteen feet away he shot each of the young men in the base of the spine.

The weapon made a stiff cracking sound like ice breaking underfoot on a frozen pond and the four men dropped to the ground without any other sound. Their heavy jackets soaked up the blood pouring out of the exit wounds in their lower abdomens, so there was very little mess. No one had noticed anything; the piles of snow had acted like sound buffers, stealing away any echo. He dropped the Desert Eagle and the suppressor into the sports bag and zipped it up.

Tritt took one quick look around, then stepped forward. He removed a pair of large, green Samsonite hard-shell suitcases from the trunk, then heaved the bodies of the four dead Chinese into the empty space.

He took the Desert Eagle out of the sports bag a second time and emptied the clip into the bodies, just to make sure. He slammed the trunk closed, took the key out of the lock and put it into his pocket. He slung the sports bag over his left shoulder, picked up a suitcase in each hand and walked back to his rental.

In this weather it would be a while before the bodies in the trunk began to emit an odor, but somewhere along the line the missing money and the absent men would surely be missed. Almost certainly the Chinese murders and the disappearance of the cash would be blamed on the Vietnamese. Maybe the whole episode would turn into a gang war and he'd be instrumental in lowering Portland's crime rate.

His rental was a black F150 truck equipped with out-sized snow tires, quite a common vehicle in Maine at this time of year. The same people who'd provided the Desert Eagle had also given him a complete identity package for a man named Art Barfield, including various hunting permits, a driver's license in the same name and a letter of introduction to a radical and obscure paramilitary group named Maine's Right Arm.

Maine's Right Arm had a membership of barely twenty active participants. The leader of MRA was Wilmot DeJean and the group was located just outside Arkham, a hamlet in the northwestern part of the state. Arkham was the largest of four villages with a total population of two thousand spread out over forty-one square miles. According to the information Tritt had been given, Wilmot DeJean was a onetime high school teacher offered early retirement for psychiatric reasons.

DeJean apparently had delusions of grandeur of an extreme nature. He used an eagle clutching a swastika as both the symbol of the organization and the tattoo on his right bicep, and he had once been investigated by the Secret Service for writing a threatening letter to the current president. This event was thought to have precipitated his early retirement. The group had been infiltrated by Homeland Security and was deemed to be a minor threat, if a threat at all. The files on both DeJean and the MRA were still open with both Homeland Security and the Secret Service, however.

"We could always just bail on the whole thing," suggested Peggy as they neared Geneva. It was almost dawn and there was a light snow falling. Both Peggy and Holliday were exhausted after their long drive, and Holliday's nerves were near the breaking point. "You go back to the university and I'll go back to Israel. Forget any of it happened." She lifted her shoulders. "You were right. None of this was our business in the first place."

"It's too late for that now," said Holliday, seated behind the wheel. "We're the patsies for whatever they have in mind."

"Which is?" Peggy asked.

"I don't have the faintest idea," said Holliday. "I don't even really know who 'they' are. The Vatican? The CIA? Rex Deus and that bitch Sinclair?"

"Maybe all three," said Peggy. "The Pope gets assassinated because he's some kind of threat to Brennan and his organization, this rogue element in the CIA is trying to alter the balance of power by getting rid of an administration that's been trying to marginalize it, and Kate Sinclair gets a shot at putting her son into the White House, or near it."

"Sounds a little complicated. Don't you think?" Holliday asked.

"Conspiracies usually are," answered Peggy. Holliday laughed. He swung the rental down the ramp at the first Geneva exit off the auto route.

"Conspiracies usually don't exist at all," he said. "They're just a lot of Internet fantasies."

"Tell that to Julius Caesar, or what's-his-name, the guy with the eye patch like yours, the Nazi Tom Cruise played. He and his buddies tried to blow up Hitler."

"Von Stauffenberg," said Holliday.

"A conspiracy only exists when it's discovered. If it succeeds no one knows it was ever there."

"Who knows?" Holliday shrugged. "Maybe you're right."

"And maybe Tritt left something behind to give us some clue."

Brennan had run Tritt's Geneva phone number and the plates on Tritt's vehicle several days before the rocket attempt on the president, and discovered that the car was registered to a man named Emil Langarotti. Langarotti's address was given as 1 Rue Henri Frederich Amiel, Apartment 5B. Holliday and Peggy booked themselves back into a suite at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, slept until noon, then headed to Tritt's pied-a-terre.

The address turned out to be a five-story, peach-colored stucco building just off the Rue des Delices, half a mile or so from their hotel. It was a quiet neighborhood around the corner from a busy thoroughfare and seemed made up almost entirely of buildings like Tritt's, done in varying pastel shades of stucco.

There was a wide, arched front door, the glass protected by ornamental ironwork. Above the door there was a large, black ONE. From a quick study it looked as though there were six apartments on each floor. Presumably Tritt's apartment was on the top one. They pulled open the big door and stepped into the building's lobby. There was a concierge's cubicle on the right but it was empty. On the left was a brass-doored elevator with a little porthole window. Directly ahead was a narrow flight of winding stairs. They took the coffin-sized elevator that creaked and groaned its way to the top floor. The elevator door opened onto an X-shaped intersection of four short corridors, badly lit by old-fashioned wall sconces. The floors were covered in green institutional carpeting that was stained and worn.

Tritt's apartment was at the end of the left-hand corridor. The door was brown-painted wood and the lock was a dead bolt.

"How are we supposed to get in?" said Peggy, a slightly sour tone in her voice. "You bring your handy-dandy lock picks with you, by any chance?"

"As a matter of fact I did," said Holliday. He reached under his jacket and pulled out the tire iron from the rental. The dead bolt was new, but the doorframe was as old as the building. He inserted the chisel end of the tire iron into the frame just above the lock and heaved. There was a sharp cracking sound as the frame around the lock set splintered. The door was open.

"You could patent that," whispered Peggy. "You could call it E-Z Key."

Holliday pushed open the door. The apartment was small, a one-bedroom. Two windows looked out onto Rue des Delices but the shutters on both were closed, letting in only slivers of daylight. The main room was anonymous, an Ikea ideal without a hint about the kind of person who lived there. Peggy crossed the old, dark hardwood floor and flipped open the louvers on the shutters. The room brightened. Couch, two bucket armchairs, all red Ikea, a glass-and-steel coffee table with a big glass ashtray. Beside it there was a remote control. A pole lamp in the corner and a small, high-intensity lamp on an end table to the right of the couch. Between the two windows was a modern desk made of some sort of maple veneer and the docking station for a laptop. A giant plasma TV had been installed above the old gas fireplace. To the left of the fireplace was an expensive, sleek Bang amp; Olufsen media center with a stereo and digital video recorder. Beneath the system was a large, fully filled cabinet of CDs and DVDs.

"Nothing here," said Holliday. He went down a short hall, heading for the bedroom. Peggy stayed in the main room and crouched down, investigating Tritt's taste in movies and music. Holliday returned a few minutes later, a sour expression on his face. "Not a thing," he said. "The man's a ghost. It's even more sterile than the place in Lyford Cay."

"Strauss, Wagner, Mozart, Verdi, Beethoven, Vivaldi, Susan Boyle." Peggy was still kneeling in front of the rack of CDs and DVDs.

"I beg your pardon?"

"It's almost all classical except for the Susan Boyle."

"Who in hell is Susan Boyle?" Holliday asked.

"You're kidding, right?" Peggy stood up. She opened the plastic case and put in the Susan Boyle disc.

"Never heard of her," said Holliday.

"You've really got to get out more, Doc," Peggy said with a grin, shaking her head. She crossed the room to the coffee table, picked up the remote and pressed the power button. Nothing happened for a second and then the huge TV over the fireplace flickered into life. A grainy image appeared of a man standing in what appeared to be some sort of derelict summer camp, an AK-47 cradled in his arms. The image was saturated with color almost to the point of being garish, and Holliday instantly thought of old home movies shot on Super 8 film. An amateurish title appeared over the figure of the man with the classic Soviet assault rifle: