The Templar Legion

28

Sir James Matheson, Ninth Earl of Emsworth, maintained two official residences in England. One was Huntington Hall, the enormous seventeenth-century ancestral estate in Derbyshire. The other was a magnificent seven-bedroom apartment in Albert Hall Mansions located between Albert Hall and the Royal Geographical Society on Kensington Gore overlooking the Albert Memorial and Kensington Gardens.

The earl and his wife, the Countess Edwina, formerly Lady Edwina Talbot, had a long-standing marital agreement that neither party would arrive at the other’s residence without an invitation and at least twenty-four hours’ notice. The twins, Justin and Jonathan, had been packed away to Barlborough Hall School since their fifth birthday and still had another six years to go before being packed away once more to Oxford or Cambridge, and thus presented no particular problem to either parent.

Neither Sir James nor Countess Edwina professed the slightest interest in what the other was doing and each left the other alone, except for formal occasions such as Royal Garden Parties, the Grand National and Royal Ascot. For the most part, Huntington Hall was the countess’s fiefdom and London belonged to Sir James.

Like most titled people in England with reputations to sustain, both the countess and Sir James had their various appropriate charities, and those charities required fund-raising. On the advice of his accountants, Sir James Matheson’s cultural charity was the Royal College of Music-even though he was known to have a tin ear that had difficulty getting the tune for even “God Save the Queen” right. He sponsored several dinners, concerts and cocktail parties for the college each year to raise money.

Unfortunately the date for one of those parties fell just forty-eight hours before the dark of the moon in Fourandao, Kukuanaland, and the launch of Matheson’s private invasion of that country. Even more unfortunate was the fact that these cocktail parties invariably took place at his apartment in Albert Hall Mansions.

Matheson’s apartment was on the fourth floor of a five-and-a-half-story building, and dwarfed both the Royal Geographical Society and Albert Hall itself. Matheson’s father, the eighth earl, either through great good fortune or liberal applications of money, had managed to purchase one of the center apartments, which had an arched, recessed balcony that stretched the width of the entire apartment and could be used in inclement weather.

A large black-and-white-tiled entrance hall led to a thirty-by-forty-foot reception room on the right. Kitchens, bedrooms, bathrooms and a sitting room were on the left. The first reception room led to a second reception room, which led out to the arched balcony; beside the reception room was a master bedroom that Matheson had renovated into a study-library, also leading out to the arched balcony. At the last tax evaluation, the apartment had been valued at eight million, two hundred thousand pounds.

At the present moment it was crammed with well over a hundred people grazing on several thousand pounds’ worth of mini Parmesan baskets filled with cauliflower puree, wild-strawberry-and-cucumber jam on toast, wild mushroom palmiers with creamed goat cheese, dragachelio baby quail egg Florentine with pink pepper hollandaise and, last but not least, the eight-pounds-a-mouthful seared miso-infused tuna. On top of that were forty strategically placed crystal vases of cut flowers spread through the entrance hall, the two reception halls and the three bathrooms designated for guest use that evening, not to mention the endless spigot of expensive French, German and Italian wines and the full bar, all of it serviced by more than two dozen waitstaff, bartenders, presenters and a ten-person cleanup crew for after the party.

In the smaller of the two reception rooms a tuxedo-wearing deejay had hooked into Matheson’s own apartment-wide Bose system, providing selections of classical music interspersed with jazz that nobody was paying the slightest attention to. There was a six-man armed security team, all dressed in tuxedos-provided by Kate Sinclair’s Blackhawk Security-to make sure that no one stole the family silver or got into violent arguments about the respective merits of Alexander Konstantinovich Glazunov and Carl Heinrich Carsten Reinecke. All of it was giving Sir James Matheson a violent headache. He really did have much more important things on his mind.

By ten he was saying good-bye to his last few guests, all of whom promised to send large donations to the Royal Academy. By eleven thirty the caterers were on the way out the door, and by midnight the apartment was his own again. He unlocked the door to his study, which had been off-limits for the evening, and stepped inside.

The room was comfortingly dark, as it usually was, the only light coming from a small green lamp on the bar. He poured himself a glass of thirty-two-year-old Auchentoshan single-malt and went over to his desk to look for an old bottle of Rofecoxib. He flipped on the desk lamp and saw that there was already someone seated in his chair, blood leaking down the starched bib front of his evening clothes from the eight-inch gaping slash across his throat. The man’s head was so thrown back by the wound that Matheson could see the cocaine frosted around his nostrils. There were several more lines of cocaine on the desk in front of the dead man, along with a rolled-up five-pound note. Matheson put down the heavy glass of whiskey. He recognized the slaughtered body: it was Simon Wells, a puff-piece writer who made the circuit putting society names into his column in boldface. A completely harmless individual with a not-uncommon taste for drugs. For a moment Matheson thought about doing the dead man’s lines on the desk to calm his nerves a little, but thought better of it.

A pole light came on in the far corner of the room. It illuminated a tall, thin black man holding an automatic pistol loosely in his hand. The man was dressed in an expensive-looking set of evening clothes and there was a glass of something that looked like gin and lemon on the table beside him. He reached for it with his free hand and took a moderate sip, the ice cubes tinkling pleasantly against the expensive Czech crystal.

“My name is Captain Jean-Luc Saint-Sylvestre of DGASEK, the Direction Generale d Action et de la Securite Exterieure de Kukuanaland, or to put it more simply, the secret police of that country.”

Matheson was smart enough and sober enough not to try to bluff and bluster. If the man in the chair had wanted to kill him he would be dead by now; if Saint-Sylvestre was from Kukuanaland he knew about the huge neodymium and tantalum strikes discovered by Ives, a discovery of rare earths in such concentrations that he could single-handedly break China’s monopoly overnight.

“May I ask why you killed poor Simon here?”

“Sadly for him he was in here doing his drugs when I came into the room. His death was necessary to keep my presence secret.”

“The door was locked,” said Matheson, trying to think as he kept up the stream of macabre chatter.

“The French doors on the balcony weren’t,” said the black man. “They were either open or your dead toxico behind the desk there slipped them open with a credit card.”

“May I sit down?” Matheson asked.

“No,” said the black man. “Remain where you are.”

“How did you get into the apartment? The party was by invitation only.”

“I pickpocketed Elton John coming up in the elevator, or at least it looked like Elton John. Nobody gave me a second look. I could just as easily have come in with the caterers and gone around poisoning all your guests.”

“What do you want?”

“A great deal of money and a share in whatever it was Archibald Ives found below Kazaba Falls. Say one million pounds in cash and one full percent of any mineral concessions granted to Matheson Resource Industries, payable in preferred shares of MRI, since you can no longer use Silver Brand Mining as your shell company.”

“One percent isn’t very much,” said Matheson. How the hell did he know about Silver Brand but not what Ives had discovered? Was there any value in that? Matheson’s brain tried to cut through the patchy fog of his headache and alcohol. Was there an advantage?

“I’m not a greedy man,” said Saint-Sylvestre. “One percent and a million pounds isn’t enough for you to risk my divulging what I know before the fact, and after the fact I’ll be able to hold it over your head for the rest of your life. You know as well as I do that this is the sort of thing that brings down governments, let alone industrial concerns like yours.”

“I deal in minerals, Mr. . ”

“Captain,” said Saint-Sylvestre. “And you’re about to deal in potential genocide.”

“What is it you think you know that I would value so much?” Matheson asked.

“In thirty-six hours you intend to launch a coup d’etat against Solomon Kolingba that will promote Francois Nagoupande as his successor. The coup is to be led by a mercenary named Konrad Lanz who has been recruiting officers and noncoms from the Ali Pasha Hotel on Clapham Street. The private soldiers will be hired by agents in Sierra Leone, ex-members of the Revolutionary Front Army of Liberia and butchers each and every one. ”

“If you win the coup and install Nagoupande he will immediately set about to kill as many Baya as he can-Kolingba’s people. When he’s done that, he’ll murder the Yakima. You think Kolingba is dangerous because he is mad, but your good friend Nagoupande in the silly uniform you bought him is even more dangerous simply because he is sane. He is a pragmatist, Lord Emsworth. A new broom sweeping clean, and in Africa that means killing your enemies. You are about to turn Kukuanaland into a killing field.”

“You think you know a great deal,” said Matheson.

“I’m not one for verbal jousting, Lord Emsworth,” Saint-Sylvestre said quietly. “I killed your banker, Leonhard Euhler from the Gesler Bank in Aarau. I killed the Brocklebank sisters in Vancouver, negating the value of your Silver Brand short-sell plan, and I killed Allen Faulkener because he got in my way. You will pay me what I ask because you are greedy, and because you know that I can and will murder without compunction. ”

“I will murder your wife in her bed at Huntington Hall, which would not unduly concern you, but I shall murder her in your bed along with Jeremy Congreve, the twenty-year-old son of your estate manager, Tom Congreve, which you would find mortifyingly embarrassing, since there already are rumors extant of your impotence. I would kill your twin sons, Justin and Jonathan, at Barlborough Hall School, gutting them like fish and leaving them floating in Butchertown Pond in the copse behind the main building. And if that didn’t convince you I’d kill your eighty-three-year-old mother at her assisted-living apartment in Oxfordshire. I’d take my time with her, Lord Emsworth; I can guarantee you that.”

“Why are you doing this?” Matheson asked. His legs felt rubbery and acid was creeping up his throat.

“The same reason you are,” said Saint-Sylvestre. “Money. And you’d better make it quick; you’re running out of time.”