The Templar Cross

25

"I'm surprised that it worked at all," confessed Holliday, sitting in the roof garden of the Hotel Alimandi and eating breakfast. It was only nine thirty but the day was already hot, the summer sun shining down from a cloudless sky. Across the Viale Vaticano Holliday could see the top of the Sistine Chapel and the ranks of tiled rooftops within the Holy City.

"I'm not," said Emil Tidyman, eating a very Western meal of sausages and scrambled eggs. "Perhaps you have to live in a religious place like Egypt to understand it. A place that has bred fundamentalist thought for a thousand years."

"I was born and raised in Israel," snorted Rafi. "What would you call that?"

"Israel is a democracy; church and state are separate. In Egypt the ulamas, the religious leaders, still control the heart and soul of the nation. The only thing the average Jew does not do is eat these," said Tidyman, waving a chunk of sausage on the end of his fork. "I'm talking about how these people think."

He ate the sausage, then reached out and poured himself another cup of coffee from the shiny silver pot in the middle of the starched linen tablecloth. He nodded toward the Vatican rooftops. "Jews have turned independent thought into a virtue. To Catholics and Muslims it is virtually a sin. Catholic fundamentalists and Muslim fundamentalists are very much alike in that they share a common fundamental belief: there is no individual, there is only Faith with a capital F. Everything is the will of God or the will of Allah and that's all there is to it. The ordinary man is powerless. Free will is for the Gods alone, interpreted by various popes and mullahs. It is their strength as well as their fatal flaw."

"History is full of that," agreed Holliday. "They took interpreting prophecy very seriously in the old days. The Macedonian kings had less power than the Oracle at Delphi. Troy fell because Cassandra's prophecy went unheeded. Caesar died because he failed to heed his soothsayers about the Ides of March."

"I still don't see what all of this has to do with our killer priests," said Rafi.

"I was just getting to that," said Tidyman seriously, putting a generous layer of honey on a thick slice of toast. "According to their dogma, Man cannot change history-history can only change Man. They have the absolute arrogance of infallibility; they are the Church, after all; how could a few outsiders presume to overpower them? It never occurred to Father Thomas or whatever he calls himself that we would act offensively against him." The Egyptian shrugged. "As I said before-we must take advantage of their vulnerabilities." He bit off a piece of toast and smiled.

"Then again," said Rafi sourly, "for all your philosophy, maybe we just got lucky."

"That, too," said Tidyman, washing his toast down with a mouthful of coffee.

"According to their schedule," said Holliday, "we've got about twelve hours left."

"Then you should make the call," responded Tidyman. "I'll go down to the desk and get the package your friend from the embassy left for us earlier."

Back in their suite Holliday called the telephone number written on the card the priest had given him. It was answered promptly on the first ring.

"Colonel," said Father Thomas. "You've come to a decision?"

"I've changed the rules," answered Holliday.

"Really," said the priest. He didn't sound impressed.

"Listen."

Holliday held the speaker of the digital recorder Vince Caruso had used the night before. He pressed the On switch.

"Yesterday's gold incisor is tomorrow's wedding band," said Father Thomas on the recorder. Holliday switched off the little machine.

"Remember that?" Holliday said.

There was a long silence. Finally the priest spoke. His voice was strained.

"I told you that you were resourceful, Colonel Holliday, but clearly I didn't know just how resourceful you really were. Someone else was obviously involved." He paused and thought for a moment. "The waiter?"

"You told me I had nothing to bargain with," answered Holliday, ignoring the priest's question. "Now I do."

"We could simply deny it," said Father Thomas. "A fake, a fabrication created by our enemies. No one would believe you."

"Not everyone, but a few would believe it. There'd be an investigation. It's like Watergate, Father Thomas. It's not the crime that gets you-it's the cover-up."

There was another long silence.

"What are you suggesting?" Father Thomas said finally.

"Just what I offered last night, except now you get a bonus. The gold and the tape. A twofer."

"How will I know you didn't make copies?" queried the priest.

"You don't," said Holliday. "But I'm not a fool. I'll keep my side of the bargain. We're well aware of your organization's long arm."

"You'd do well to remember it," warned Father Thomas.

"A trade and a truce," offered Holliday.

"That would require an exchange."

"I'll call you," said Holliday. He hung up the phone.

"Will he actually do it?" Rafi asked.

"Not in a million years," said Holliday.

Tidyman reappeared a few minutes later carrying a heavy-looking rectangular box wrapped in brown paper. He sat down on the couch, took a penknife from his pocket and opened the box with a few deft slices through the paper. Inside the plain covering was a medium-sized blue Tupperware container, and inside the plastic box, packed in foam peanuts, were three automatic pistols, three boxes of ammunition in plastic strip-clips, a GPS unit and five black Nokia cell phones.

"Will the lieutenant get in trouble if any of this surfaces?" Tidyman asked.

"We're supposed to toss the weapons and the phones when we're done-they're clean, untraceable. The GPS unit he wants back if possible," replied Holliday.

"The boat?" Tidyman asked.

"Leaves the dock at the Marconi Bridge at noon," said Holliday. "It gets to Ostia Antica at one thirty." He glanced at his watch. "We've got an hour and a half to set up." He looked across to Tidyman. "You know what to do?"

"There is a big potted plant by the doorway next to the pizzeria with the green awning at Santamaura Street and Via Candia," recited the Egyptian. "I plant the phone there, call you when I'm done and then get to the bridge in time to catch the boat."

"Rafi?"

"When you call me I get to the Castro Pretorio stop on the Metro and then I call the priest. I make sure he hears the announcer on the PA system give the name of the stop."

"Then what?" quizzed Holliday.

"I get on the subway and go in the opposite direction to the Marconi stop. Then I get myself to the bridge and the boat." The Israeli paused. "If any of us are being followed we'll know by then. We hope."

"Good," said Holliday. He could almost feel the blood rushing through his veins. "That's it. Are we ready?"

"Ready," said Tidyman.

"Ready," said Rafi.

Holliday smiled to himself, a little surprised at the depth of his emotions.

He hadn't felt this alive in years. This was who he was.

"Let's saddle up then," he said.

"Not 'lock and load'?" Rafi grinned.

"Different generation," said Holliday. "I'm from the John Wayne era, but yeah, that too."

For Holliday it was a simple exercise in applied tactics: when faced with a superior numerical force the primary objective was to distract the enemy and split his forces; divide and conquer. The Normandy invasion was a classic example: make Rommel's forces believe that the invasion was coming at Pas de Calais, the obvious choice, then attack somewhere else, in that case the beaches at Normandy.

For Rafi and Tidyman it was a bit too obvious, like a high school football play: fake left, go right. Distract the priest and his thugs and send them on a wild-goose chase to the north on the subway line, but attack them with a much smaller force to the south, into the heart of enemy territory.

Using a map of Rome and Vince Caruso's familiarity with the city, they concocted a Robert Ludlum-Jason Bourne, cat-and-mouse, hither-and-yon, hares-and-hounds game across the city that would supposedly lead the priest and his men to where the exchange of Peggy for the location of the bullion would take place. In fact, it would all be a figment of their collective imaginations, the moves and countermoves orchestrated with generic, throwaway cell phones and overseen by Lieutenant Caruso driving his Italian girlfriend's Dragon Red Vespa GTS-250 scooter. With the paper chase concentrating Father Thomas and his colleagues, Holliday, Rafi and Tidyman would meet at the Marconi Bridge on the downstream River Tiber, then board a river sightseeing cruiser down to the old ruins at Ostia Antica, Rome's original port, now two miles inland after the deposit of three thousand years' worth of accumulated river silt.

If things went according to plan they would discover a speedboat left for them by Vince Caruso at the marina where the sightseeing boat docked, which they would then use to reach the fishing shack where Peggy was being held hostage.

Like most rescue plans it looked perfect on paper, and like most rescue plans, as Holliday well knew, it would be anything but perfect in its execution. Still, it wasn't bad for something put together in a hurry. In every theater of war Holliday had fought in, he'd seen much worse plans generated by entire committees of so-called experts, and over the years he'd developed a basic rule of thumb: in war, just like cooking, too many cooks just screwed things up. In his own mind it was all pretty straightforward. Find Peggy, kill anybody who got in their way, grab her and get the hell out of town as quickly as possible.

The Ponte Guglielmo Marconi crossed the Tiber River south of Rome in a surprisingly rural area, especially on the southern side. The dock for the sightseeing boats was located a little downstream of the wide modern bridge on the bank of the river, squeezed in between a junior league rugby field and some fenced- off public tennis courts. The only way to get to it was down a dirt road that seemed to peter off the farther along you went. If it hadn't been for Lieutenant Caruso's detailed directions none of them would have ever found it. On the other hand, it was the perfect spot for a rendezvous; if anyone was following you they could be spotted a mile off. The boat was a small converted passenger ferry named, not surprisingly, the M.V. Horatio. She had three wedding-cake decks outfitted with restaurant-style booths set beside large tinted picture windows.

Holliday arrived first and waited on the dock, receiving updates from Caruso on his cell phone every few minutes. As far as the young lieutenant could see everything was going according to plan. Father Thomas had successfully retrieved the cell phone left for him in the potted shrub by Tidyman and had begun his wild-goose chase. According to Caruso there was no sign of the bald Father Damaso.

At eleven forty Emil Tidyman arrived, improbably dressed as a tourist in a Hawaiian shirt, a straw hat and big sunglasses with both binoculars and a camera hung around his neck. Ten minutes later Rafi appeared on the dock. As far as Holliday could tell neither man had been followed. He waited until they were about to pull in the gangplank before he boarded the broad-beamed, top-heavy ferry, and shortly afterward the M.V. Horatio eased out into the turbid green water and began making its ponderous way downstream.

They made their way along the sinuous snaking river for an hour. It wasn't very exciting as sightseeing trips went; the great buildings and monuments of Rome had been built farther upstream, centered on the city's seven hills. For the most part all there was to see was the pastoral weed-choked banks of the river and the spans of various modern bridges. The advantage to Holliday and his companions was that taking the sightseeing boat made pursuit unlikely, if not impossible.

The Horatio eventually turned in toward shore and docked at a comfortably ramshackle pier at Ostia Antica. The ruins, an entire city of them, were spread out over hundreds of acres. The buildings, no more than crumbling walls and tiled floors, were silent testament to the ancient port city's violent end.

In A.D. 67 bands of roving pirates had descended on the city in ragtag fleets, burning everything as they went, eventually leading to the enactment of the Lex Gabinia, the law of Gabianus, its creator, giving the emperor of Rome far-reaching and completely arbitrary powers that were reminiscent of the panicked regulations enacted after 9/11.

Power corrupts, Holliday reminded himself as he stepped off the boat, and absolute power corrupts absolutely; Father Thomas and his minions were proof enough of that. The pastoral teachings of a wandering prophet had been perverted into a tool of war.

Instead of following the rest of the passengers up the path toward the ruins, Holliday, Rafi and Tidyman turned right, taking a barely visible dirt track that ran beneath the old trees along the riverbank.

"This is like something out of a really bad Disney movie," said Tidyman. "Tales of the Riverbank or something. You expect Bambi to come out of the trees or bluebirds singing a merry tune and dropping daisies on our heads."

"What do you know about Disney movies?" Holliday asked.

"I used to run home from school every day just to watch Annette Funicello's breasts grow on the Mickey Mouse Club," said Tidyman. "Zorro. Davy Crocket."

"Thumper," added Holliday. "Bambi."

"Just remember what happened to Bambi's mother," cautioned Tidyman, laughing.

"You've got a very strange sense of humor for an Egyptian," said Holliday.

"What are you old men mumbling about now?" said Rafi, bringing up the rear of the little procession filing through the trees.

"I think it is called whistling in the dark," said Tidyman. "Smiling in the face of adversity."

A hundred feet farther along the low bank they came upon an old man fishing with a long pole, just as Vince Caruso had described. The man had white hair as fine as a baby's over a spotted skull, white stubble on his chin. Probably one of the army of relatives that Caruso seemed to have just about everywhere. There was a plastic bucket of squirming silver-bellied eels beside the man.

"Qual e il tranello?" Holliday asked, carefully repeating the phrase just the way Caruso had told him. "What's the catch?"

"Oggi c'e la pesca del salmone," the old man answered with a gap-toothed grin. "Salmon is the catch of the day." It was the correct response.

"La barca?" Holliday asked. "The boat?"

"Li," said the man, pointing with his sandpaper chin.

They found it a little farther along the bank, half hidden by artfully concealing shrubbery and weeds. It was a sixteen-foot classic drift boat with a high pointed bow and a narrow transom fitted with an oddly shaped outboard motor.

The boat was filthy, with a pile of rancid-looking throw net in the bow and half a dozen long bamboo poles hanging off the sides. The seats were covered in fish scales and the paint on the sides was peeling. There was a pair of scruffily painted oars shipped along the gunwales and a variety of tackle boxes, boat hooks, gaffs and other equipment littering the flat bottom. The boat smelled of dead, rotting fish left too long in the sun.

"Is this somebody's idea of a joke?" Rafi asked, staring at the boat tied up to an overhanging willow branch. "Because I don't think it's very funny."

"It's not a joke," said Holliday. "It's protective coloration. My course in the history of camouflage was the only thing Vince ever got an A in." He grinned broadly. "I always knew the kid would go far even though he got such lousy marks." Holliday shook his head. "It's perfect-what do you do on a river? You fish. That's an electric outboard, a trolling motor, which means it'll be silent. Look at the current out there: the tide is going out; we'll be sucked down the river like a freight train." As if to prove his point a waterlogged tree limb went swirling by in the rushing center of the river.

"How far?" Tidyman asked.

"According to Vince, two miles," answered Holliday. He undid the line from the willow branch. "Climb aboard, gents, this is the endgame. Let's go get Peggy."