The Templar Heresy

33

Pretty much the first thing that Farooq did after he and his companions had landed and made their way into the city from the airport was assemble his men in a café a couple of blocks outside the Old City, and make a telephone call to a local number. It was answered almost immediately, and the conversation that followed was short and largely monosyllabic, at least at Farooq’s end. Less than a minute later, he ended the call and gestured to two of the men to accompany him.

‘We should be about half an hour, maybe a little longer,’ he told the four others still sitting in the café. ‘The meeting place is on the outskirts of the city. Wait here until we get back.’

Then Farooq turned away and raised his arm to hail a cab that had just turned into the street.

In fact, it was just over an hour before the three men returned to the café. Farooq glanced around, but as far as he could tell they were unobserved. People were passing in the street, talking together, looking at maps, wielding cameras and all the other tourist-oriented activities that are an enduring and inevitable part of daily life in a city like Jerusalem. More to the point, nobody appeared to be paying them the slightest attention.

He nodded to his two companions, each of whom took two obviously heavy packets from their pockets and passed them over, one to each of the other four men.

‘Don’t open them now,’ Farooq instructed. ‘Wait until you’re alone. They’re a mix of different makes, a couple of Brownings, a Sig and a Walther, but all nine millimetre and each with twenty rounds of ammunition.’

‘Only twenty rounds?’ one of the men asked.

‘That’s nearly one hundred and fifty between the seven of us,’ Farooq replied. ‘And you all know that we’re not here to get involved in a firefight. The weapons are for your personal protection and for use against the infidels if the need arises, though in this environment a quieter assassination method would obviously be more appropriate. That is why you also each have a knife and a garrotte.’

He looked around the group.

‘When you open the packets, you’ll see that the magazines aren’t loaded and the shells are loose, so you may wish to do something about that sooner rather than later. The three of us have already prepared and loaded our weapons.’

‘What use is a pistol wrapped up in a bit of paper with an empty magazine?’ another of the men said. ‘I’m going to the restroom to load mine right now.’

Without waiting for a response, he pushed back his chair and strode into the café, heading towards the lavatories at the back of the building.

Over the next twenty minutes the other three men followed their colleague’s example, visiting the stall in the male lavatory, to unwrap, check and then load the pistols Farooq had purchased. Finally they reassembled at the café table.

‘So what do we do now?’ one of the men asked.

‘We do nothing,’ Farooq said. ‘Khaled has not told me yet when he will be arriving, but it will probably be sometime today, or tomorrow at the latest. Once he gets here we can do whatever it is that he wants and then return to Iraq. Or that’s what I hope, anyway.’

‘You still haven’t told us why we’re here.’

‘I haven’t told you because I don’t know,’ Farooq replied. ‘But he’s paying us, and paying well, so we’ll just have to wait and see what he intends to do.’

‘How long do we wait, then?’

Farooq shrugged. ‘As long as it takes.’