The Templar Throne

8

They found a little terrace restaurant on the other side of the Jewish Quarter and sat at a shaded table out of the direct sunlight. The restaurant was called U Vltavy, probably because it was only a block from the river. They had an odd menu-part Mexican, part Austrian and part Czech. Sister Meg had gazpacho and some sort of pork dish with freshly ground horseradish, while Holliday settled on beef stroganoff with rice and some of the same horseradish. They ate in silence for a while, enjoying the summer warmth and watching the tourists go past.

For some reason he didn't quite understand, Holliday had always enjoyed Prague more than any other city in Europe, east or west, even during the Soviet era. The locals had a sense of humor and seemed innately curious about everyone and everything. They'd use any excuse to engage tourists in friendly conversation, and a favorite game on the subways was to trade language-a few words of Czech in exchange for a few words in English. There was even a television channel that showed nothing but English movies with Czech subtitles as a language teaching aid.

Perhaps it had something to do with a few thousand years of being the western end of the Silk Road. With a few rare exceptions the city had been remarkably tolerant and welcoming to people of all races. It came as no surprise to Holliday that the Czechs were the first to rise up against the Soviet regime in 1989.

Thinking about that year always brought a smile to his face. After seventy-odd years of Soviet hegemony and the Iron Curtain, it had all turned out to be smoke and mirrors. The vaunted power of the Soviet army with its thousands of tanks turned out to be invested in so many inert chunks of rusting, immobile steel, silent for want of enough gasoline to run them a hundred feet, let alone a thousand miles into the heart of NATO territory.

The guidance systems in half their intercontinental ballistic missiles were years out of date, the people of Moscow were running out of toilet paper and the armed forces hadn't been paid in a year. It was all a lie, and the United States' supposedly all-knowing intelligence community hadn't seen it coming. Not even close. It was just as much a crock as the Russians'. Apparently you certainly could fool all of the people all of the time.

"What are you smiling about?" Sister Meg asked, patting her lips with her napkin, her face pleasantly flushed by the fresh horseradish. His smile broadened; maybe that old paranoid story was true; maybe we never really did land astronauts on the moon; it was all a story cooked up on a back lot somewhere by Richard Nixon and his cronies.

"Things never work out the way people think," answered Holliday. "Reality gets in the way or something comes flying in from left field and upsets the applecart."

"Nice mixed metaphor," the nun said and smiled.

"There's an old Jewish saying-Man plans, God laughs."

"You're talking about the painting?" Sister Meg said.

"It changes everything. It proves that Saint-Clair really did have the Quadrant and Lucas Cranach thought it was important."

"There's nothing in the archives about the Blessed Juliana going to Venice; not a mention."

"Someone knew," said Holliday. "Cranach must have known or he wouldn't have painted them like that two hundred years after the fact."

"But how?" Sister Meg asked.

"It's not hard to figure out. Dig deeply enough into history and you can always find the degrees of separation between people. Cranach was a painter with a number of important patrons, including kings. Royalty during the Renaissance was a tight little group. Contemporaries boasted about their patronage. Cranach could have easily known a Venetian painter. Some of his early work looks a lot like Domenico Ghirlandaio, for instance. Maybe they shared stories looking for subject matter." Holliday shrugged. "Maybe one of Ghirlandaio's patrons was a member of the Zeno family. They were rich enough."

"So now you're an art expert?"

"Not really, but paintings were the Middle Ages equivalent of news footage or photographs. A lot of information about battles and tactics can be found on the walls of major art galleries."

"Do you have an answer for everything?"

Holliday sighed and put down his fork, his appetite gone.

"Only to snotty questions from arrogant nuns." He stared at her across the table. "You've been riding me since we met," he said. "Why? What did I do to you?"

"You've been patronizing me from the beginning," she answered.

"If that's true I certainly didn't do it on purpose," said Holliday.

"That doesn't make it any better."

"I've been teaching eighteen-year-old wet-behind-the-ears cadets for the last few years. Maybe that's why I seem patronizing. Before that I was ordering soldiers around."

"I'm not a cadet or a soldier and I'm not wet behind the ears or eighteen either."

Something caught Holliday's eye and he glanced over her shoulder.

"Don't look now but Cue Ball is back."

Sister Meg froze. She stared at Holliday, eyes wide.

"You're joking," she said coldly. "If this is a joke then all bets are off. We go our separate ways."

"No joke. He's leaning on a lamppost at the end of the block reading that stupid newspaper of his." Holliday shook his head. "He's going to get skin cancer on that chrome dome if he stays out in the sun without a hat the way he does."

"How did he find us?"

"He must have figured we'd head for the convent. He had to be waiting for us to come out and then followed us here."

"What should we do?"

"Why don't you decide," said Holliday. "I wouldn't want to sound patronizing or anything." He sat back in his chair and waited.

"Maybe we shouldn't do anything," she said. "He knows we'll eventually go back to the hotel."

"What if we don't?"

"Pardon."

"You have your passport on you?" Holliday asked.

"Always." She nodded, patting the plain canvas bag in her lap.

"Me too," said Holliday. "Anything you'll miss back at the hotel?"

"Just some clothes, a few toiletries. What are you suggesting?"

"Hang on," said Holliday. He took out his BlackBerry and thumbed the keys.

"What are you doing?" Sister Meg asked.

Holliday looked down at the little screen.

"There's a train to Vienna with connections to Venice leaving Praha hlavni nadrazi at five o'clock this afternoon. It gets into Venice at eight tomorrow morning. If we can give Cue Ball the slip until then we should be okay."

"We have to get out of here first."

Holliday casually twisted around in his chair.

"That's Listopadu Street up ahead, which means the Starenova Synagogue is a couple of blocks south of us," he muttered, trying to orient himself. "That means the restaurant has to back onto the top end of the Jewish Cemetery."

"So?"

"That's our way out."

Holliday dug into his wallet, pulled out a fifty-koruna note-coincidentally the one with a picture of Agnes of Bohemia on it-then dropped it on the table to cover their bill. He took out another koruna, this one an orange-brown two-hundred-crown note, worth about fifty dollars American. He stuck his wallet back into his pocket.

"I'm going to get up and go into the restaurant. Cue Ball will think I'm going to the bathroom. Count to sixty, then get up and do the same. At a dead run it'll take him a couple of minutes to get down here. Got it?"

"Of course," snapped the nun irritably.

Holliday stood and disappeared into the restaurant. Sister Meg waited as long as she could, then followed him inside. He was waiting at the rear of the dining room, standing beside a young dark-haired waiter in a long apron.

"Sledujte mne, prosim," said the young man, motioning with one hand. Follow me, please. He led them through a pair of swing doors, into the kitchen and through another door that led to a narrow courtyard. At the back of the cigarette-butt-littered space was a low stone wall that looked very old. It was made of small stones mortared together and topped with curved, half-pipe terra-cotta tiles to facilitate drainage. Holliday boosted himself up onto the wall and the young man cupped his hands into a stirrup for Sister Meg. A few seconds later she was on top of the wall with Holliday.

"Dekuji," said Holliday, thanking the waiter.

"Za malo." The waiter shrugged. No big thing. He lit a cigarette and stood watching as Holliday and the red-haired nun jumped down on the far side of the wall.

The Josefov cemetery is the oldest existing Jewish burial ground in Europe, dating back to 1439 and used up until 1787. It is small as cemeteries go, taking up less than an acre made up of the courtyards of a long, L-shaped block, but more than a hundred thousand people are buried there, some in spots twelve coffins deep, the headstones only marking the people buried in the top layer.

With most of the stones less than a foot apart, there is almost no space for grass to grow. The roots of the big overarching shade trees have moved the worn and almost indecipherable headstones every which way and there is a ruined, abandoned sense to the place that is far from true. Countless visitors flock to the cemetery each year, paying their ten crowns and their respects to the dead. Rabbi Low, the creator of the forerunner of Frankenstein's monster, the golem from Vlatava mud, is buried here, as are other Jewish notables.

Dropping down into the cemetery, Holliday and Sister Meg found themselves hemmed in by headstones and had to pick their way slowly and carefully between the markers until they reached one of the main paving-stone pathways that wound around the property.

The pathway was crowded, mainly with tourists, some of them carrying cameras, some reading the old Hebrew inscriptions. The only thing they had in common was the fact that none of their heads were bare. For a few moments as they threaded their way through the crowds, Holliday wasn't sure why everyone seemed to be glaring at him. Then he remembered that it was considered disrespectful to enter a Jewish cemetery without some kind of head covering.

Less than a minute later they reached the exit, an old gatehouse, and bullied their way out onto a narrow street lined with souvenir carts selling postcards, paper hats and little plastic golems. The whole thing was so crass Holliday almost expected one of the carts to be selling Rabbi Low action figures.

"Now what?" Sister Meg said. It was hot and a thin line of sweat had formed on her forehead where her headpiece was tight.

"I've got an idea," answered Holliday. He took a quick look around to make sure that Cue Ball wasn't anywhere in sight, then turned down Stroka Street, heading for the river. They reached the open plaza of Jan Palach Square and crossed to the statue of Antonin Dvorjak. Jan Palach Square had once been known as Namesti Krasnoarmejcu, or Square of the Red Army Soldiers, but had changed after a twenty-year-old student named Jan Palach covered himself with gasoline and set himself alight to protest the Soviet occupation in 1969.

Skirting the statue, they went down a few steps to the park that ran beside the river. Directly in front of them, in the shadow of the Manesuv Most, or Lesser Town Bridge, was a large floating dock with an outdoor cafe and several tour boats tied up.

A boat with a Staropramen beer ad on the side named Vltava Kralovna, Vlatava Queen, was loading passengers. Holliday and Sister Meg joined the lineup. Holliday paid thirty dollars for each of them and they went aboard. The boat was not much more than a barge with rows of seats and a fiberglass canopy. A few minutes later they cast off and headed downriver. Holliday had kept his eyes on the gangplank and there'd been no sign of Cue Ball. It looked as though they'd lost him for the second time.

The boat slipped under the bridge and continued downstream, the immense looming fortress of Prague Castle on the high bluff on the far side of the river to their left, with the Lesser Town laid out below it. They rounded a bend, making their way through a near traffic jam of tour boats and sport fishermen, and then went under the low gray span of the Cechuv Bridge.

"Just exactly where are we going?" Sister Meg asked. "Or is this some kind of mystery tour?"

"No mystery," answered Holliday. "We're going to the train station without Cue Ball knowing where we're going. If he managed to follow us we'd know it. I was watching the gangway after we got on. He's not aboard."

Stavice Island lies slightly off center in midriver about a mile downstream from the Lesser Town Bridge where they had embarked. Although awkwardly located, Stavice had been home to Prague's first professional hockey rink and grass tennis courts. The island was also where there had once been a series of dangerous rapids, now smoothed to a simple weir with no more than a three-foot drop and with a lock installed between the island and the nearside riverbank to make downstream navigation possible and as an aid to flood control, a perennial problem in the spring.

Their tour boat entered the long lockway and waited for the enclosure to empty before the lock doors opened to let them through.

"Come on," said Holliday. He grabbed Meg by the hand and pulled her over to the gunwale on the right-hand side of the boat, elbowing chattering passengers out of the way as he did so.

"What are you doing!?" Meg yelped as Holliday quickly climbed up onto the broad steel gunwale. An older woman in a large floppy hat and enormous lime green sunglasses let out a squeaking shriek of alarm.

"Getting off the boat," answered Holliday. He leaned out, grabbed an iron rung bolted into the stone wall of the lock and began to climb. Meg had no choice except to follow, acutely aware of the heavyset German in the Hawaiian shirt and his apple-dumpling wife who were getting a perfect view up her skirt.

Using swear words she hadn't uttered since high school, she clambered up the iron ladder after Holliday. A furious-looking lockmaster came charging out of his little control booth yelling as Holliday hauled her up onto the walkway at the top of the ladder. He turned and yelled back at the man.

"Policiye!" Holliday bellowed.

Down in the lock the captain of the tour boat sounded his air horn. Confused, the lockmaster turned and ran back into his control booth to activate the big swing doors.

"Run," said Holliday.

They headed up a wide set of concrete stairs. At the top of the steps was a paved road, and on the far side a series of fenced-in clay tennis courts, all in use, the pock-pock hollow sound of tennis balls sounding like a metronome. Behind the open courts were the bloated science-fiction sausages of several canvas inflatable domes.

"Where are we?" Meg asked.

"Stavice Island. It's a big public sports complex."

"Why here?"

Holliday pointed to the left. Through a stand of trees Meg could see the approaches to a bridge.

"That's Hlavkuv Most," said Holliday. "The Hlavek Bridge. Cross that and you're on Wilsonova, which is where the main Prague train station is. Satisfied?"

"Wasn't there an easier way of getting here than by playing Tarzan?" Meg asked.

"Just being careful," said Holliday. "When you're tailing someone you usually use more than one person. If there was a second tail on the boat we lost him, too."

They began walking down the road toward the bridge.

"Do you honestly think all this cloak-and-dagger stuff is necessary?" Meg asked, her tone sour. "It really does seem a little over the top, you know, climbing over walls into graveyards and jumping off boats. Bald spies skulking about looking suspicious. People following us halfway across Europe. Come on now, Colonel."

"Come on, yourself," Holliday answered. "This ark you're looking for, how valuable would you say the contents are, if they exist?"

"They'd be priceless, of course," she replied.

"Right, and I've seen people killed for a lot less than 'priceless,' believe me, Sister."

The Prague Hilton was located just off the multilaned, elevated Wilsonova on Porezni Street, only a block away from the river. It was a huge place with a glass-pyramid-enclosed atrium and everything a well-heeled international traveler could want. It took less than ten minutes for Holliday and his companion to reach the hotel from the island and half an hour more to shop for the things they needed, including a couple of small designer suitcases for their purchases.

It was three in the afternoon by the time they finished, so they took a taxi for a short ride to the station. They picked up tickets in the new belowground station and then walked down the long concourse to the original Art Nouveau station, which had been turned into a large kavarna, or cafe.

They sat in the big stained-glass-domed restaurant drinking excellent coffee and snacking on jam-filled palacinky, the Czech version of crepes. At four fifteen the early boarding call for sleeping car passengers on the through train to Venice via Vienna was called and they went back down the concourse to the main station and boarded.

Neither Holliday nor Sister Meg had noticed the slight, neatly bearded man and his attractive companion seated on the concrete bench next to the waiting train, and they wouldn't have recognized them even if they had noticed, although Holliday had once seen them from a distance in front of a hotel on the Cote d'Azur more than a year ago.

Like Cue Ball, the bearded man and the woman had been waiting outside the convent that morning and had followed them to the Vlatava restaurant as well. They'd seen Holliday and the nun do their little vanishing act and had watched, amused, as Cue Ball panicked.

The man and the woman hadn't bothered to keep up their surveillance. The man had already correctly deduced Holliday's eventual destination and the woman concurred. They might go back to their hotel, but from the look on their faces it was clear that they'd discovered something in the gallery-convent, and it was equally clear that they'd assume that the airport at Ruzyne just outside the city would be under surveillance as well.

The train station was the most likely answer. They'd arrived well before Holliday and Sister Meg, and they'd been behind them in the line when the ex-Ranger and the nun bought their tickets to Venice. They followed suit, purchasing a double berth two doors down from Holliday's compartment. The bearded man then bribed a porter to let him wait for the train to be called at trackside and they watched as the couple boarded the train.

Calmly, Antonin Pesek, Father Thomas Brennan's chosen arm's-length assassin, and his Canadian wife, Daniella Kay, got up from the bench and stepped aboard themselves. A few minutes later amid a flurry of horns and clanging bells the lumbering overnight train to Venice left the station.