The Templar Throne

5

They crossed the Czech border at Rozvadov. Before the Soviet Union fell apart, Rozvadov had been a gloomy place in the forest with a no- man's-land of tree stumps, barbed wire, land mines and guard towers full of armed men. Now it was a modern waypoint with lines of bored truckers waiting for their bonded loads of Mercedes parts and beer to be passed through customs.

As they were waved over the line after showing their passports, Holliday glanced to his left. The no-man'sland was still there, a healed gash like the path of a whirl-wind through the dark trees, but the stumps were gone and so was the barbed wire and the guard towers. It was like the old Civil War battlegrounds back home-rolling green sod. Picnic parks where the blood of thousands and sometimes tens of thousands had been spilled, and for what? Emancipation? Breaking the Southern cotton cartels? A difference of attitude? A hundred and fifty years later whatever it was didn't really seem to matter anymore and the hundreds of thousands of soldiers were still just as dead and gone.

He drove the big rental VW sedan through the pleasant rural countryside beyond the forest and thought about soldiers and wars and dying for your country. They'd asked him to pose for a recruiting poster once because he looked so romantic with his weathered, outdoor, Marlboro Man face, not to mention the rakish look of adventure the patch on his eye gave him. He turned them down because it was all a lie.

The army wasn't a ticket to travel and adventure and anyone with a brain in his head knew it. The army was a gamble. You got a free education if you wanted it, in return for the strong possibility of having your legs or your arms or your head blown off by an Iraqi or an Afghani or a Pakistani with a stick of dynamite, a RadioShack detonator, and a bag of rusty nails for a payload.

The truth of it was most people who joined the army or the navy or the air force or the marines didn't have a brain in their heads; they were too young and wet behind the ears. And they didn't join up to protect their country or make the world safe for democracy-they joined up because they couldn't get a job anywhere else, or they were trying to get away from something the way Holliday had been trying to get away from his drunk, abusive old man when he joined up.

And there certainly wasn't anything romantic about his eye, or lack of it. Like an idiot he'd been riding with his head up out of the hatch of a Humvee on a road outside Kabul, and like a forgetful idiot he hadn't been wearing his protective goggles. A piece of gravel thrown up by the tires had scratched his cornea and it became infected and eventually he'd lost the eye.

"A penny for them," said Sister Meg, sitting primly in the passenger seat, hands folded in her lap.

"You don't want to know," said Holliday.

"It's still a hundred and fifty kilometers to Prague; we have to talk about something."

Holliday knew she was trying to be friendly but he wasn't in the mood.

"I was wondering why soldiers become soldiers," he said finally. "And I couldn't come up with one good reason."

"I expect it's the same reason priests become priests and nuns become nuns," answered Sister Meg instantly. "Because they believe in what they're doing."

"Bull," snapped Holliday coldly. "You're talking about heroic gestures. Heroes are generally pretty stupid, in my experience. And on a battlefield the last thing you're thinking about is belief in anything beyond your own immediate survival. If you're thinking about anything other than pissing your own pants and saving your own skin maybe you're thinking about the buddy you're sharing your foxhole with, but that's about it. In war the operative emotion is fear, believe me."

"You're a very cynical man, Mr. Holliday."

"I've been in a lot more wars than you have, Sister. True believers and heroes make the worst soldiers. They take foolish unnecessary risks and they get people killed."

The red-haired nun gave him what was probably her most withering look.

"If everyone thought that way there never would have been an American Revolution," she argued. Her hands were balled into fists on her lap now and there were red, flushed circles on her cheeks.

"And maybe there shouldn't have been," Holliday said and shrugged, beginning to enjoy baiting the young woman. "Canada became a nation on its own quite peacefully. They never had a crippling civil war and they abolished slavery thirty years before we did without killing more than half a million young men in the process."

"You're not much of a patriot, are you?" Sister Meg responded.

" 'The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders,' " quoted Holliday. "That is the easy part. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country." He glanced at the nun seated across from him. "Sound like a familiar policy? A bit of Fox News?"

"Who said it?" Sister Meg sighed.

"Hermann Goring," answered Holliday. "Commander of Hitler's Luftwaffe."

"Maybe we should stick to medieval history," suggested the nun.

"Maybe you're right," said Holliday.

They drove on in silence.

They followed the Autoroute east, bypassing Pilsen, where Pilsner beer had been invented, and reached the outskirts of Prague an hour later. It hadn't changed much since Holliday had been there last-it still looked like a poster for Stalin-era architecture, block after dreary block of concrete high- rise slabs filled with hundreds of tiny apartments. Looking carefully you could see the differences, though-there was no laundry drying on the balconies now and the cars in the parking lots were mostly Japanese instead of the ubiquitous twenty-horsepower East German Trabants or the locally manufactured Skodas with their infamously faulty brakes. Funny how bad Soviet cars had been, Holliday thought. They'd made excellent tanks and machine guns during World War Two.

"Presumably you'll want to go to the convent," said Holliday as he navigated his way through the unfamiliar cloverleafs and the equally unfamiliar blue and white signage.

"No," answered Sister Meg quietly. "The only accommodation is at the monastery next door. The convent has been entirely converted into a museum now."

"All right, the monastery then."

"I've only been doing research here. The Convent of St. Agnes isn't my Mother House. This is the high season for the monks. They make most of their income from renting out the cells in the monastery to young travelers. I have my own source of private income. I was renting a room in Andel, but they are tearing the building down to put up another condominium. I'm really quite homeless."

"Don't worry, I know just the place," said Holliday.

He guided the big Volkswagen off the D5 and onto the narrower E50, coming into the city from the south-east. They drove into another clutch of function- before-beauty apartment blocks. He turned off on Slavinskeho Street. The fuselage and tail section of an old Tupolev airliner in Czech Airlines red-orange livery stood pancaked and wheels-up in a vacant lot beside a long windowless building.

"Good Lord," said Sister Meg, staring. "What on earth is that doing there?"

"It's a prop," explained Holliday. "The Barrandov Film Studios are down the way about half a mile. I think the building there is a special effects lab." Holliday turned onto Geologika Street and pulled into a parking lot beside a three-story barracks-style building with a curved glass extension along the front that looked like a greenhouse. On the other side of the street was a row of apartment blocks.

There was a familiar Best Western sign on the scruffy lawn in front of the glass extension that read HOTEL SMARAGD.

"Smaragd means Emerald," explained Holliday. "When they built all those high-rises across the street during the Soviet era the hotel was a barracks for the foreign workers they brought in. After the Soviet Union collapsed a couple of brothers bought the building for next to nothing and turned it into a budget hotel. They didn't have much money to work with and the only paint they could get was an awful government green; that's the reason for the name. Everything's white now. It's not the Ritz but it's comfortable and it's cheap."

"It looks fine," Sister Meg said. They climbed out of the car, got their bags from the trunk and went into the small, low-ceilinged lobby of the hotel. An open archway on the right led into the curved glass extension-the hotel restaurant and bar. On the left was an enclosed counter with something like a sitting room behind it. A balding man in a T-shirt was leaning on the counter reading a newspaper. At the rear of the lobby a wide staircase led to the second floor. There was a scattering of seventies Swedish Modern armchairs beside the reception counter and a rack of postcards. A fat man in a bad suit came into the hotel and sat down in one of the armchairs and opened up a copy of Czekhiya Sevodnya. His head looked like a shiny cue ball.

They booked in, taking a double room, and climbed the stairs to the second floor. The rooms were oddly laid out, reflecting their barracks origins. Each double room had a small tiled foyer with a shared bathroom against the outside wall and a door leading into a bedroom to each side. The rooms were square, utilitarian, and equipped with twin beds, one lamp, one child-size desk with a telephone and a television. Nothing had changed since Holliday's last stay; there were two channels in English, British Sky News and CNN. Everything else was in Czech or German.

Holliday dropped off his bag, washed his hands and then went across the room to Sister Meg's room. She'd changed into a man's white shirt, jeans and sneakers, but still wore the obviously religious head covering. Apparently there was no middle ground for Sister Meg; a nun was a nun was a nun.

"Settled in?" Holliday asked. He gave her his best smile, feeling a little guilty for baiting her in the car the way he had.

"As well as can be expected." She glanced around the bleak little room. "Not much in the way of ambience, is there?"

"It has a certain ascetic je ne sais quoi," answered Holliday in a la-de-dah voice.

The nun laughed, which seemed to be a step in the right direction.

"I thought we could go down to the restaurant and have something to eat. The last time we did was in that awful place on the Autobahn."

"Nordsee?" Sister Meg said. She made a face.

"You should have known better than to order curried prawns and fries in the middle of Germany," Holliday said with a grin.

"Is the food any better here?"

"They do a good goulash and their veal cutlets and dumplings are good."

"As long as the chef hasn't changed."

"He's one of the brothers who owns the hotel," said Holliday.

They went downstairs to the restaurant, a long narrow room looking out onto the scrappy lawn with tables on the right and a bar on the left. A man in an apron sat on a stool behind the bar reading a newspaper. There were only two other people in the dining room, a gray-haired man with a Vandyke beard drinking Bacardi and Coke and a lean and quite handsome middle-aged man who was vaguely familiar, drinking a long- necked Staropramen beer. The familiar-looking man spoke only English and the older man with the beard spoke accented English, but ordered in Czech.

"E.T.," Holliday said finally.