Tales of the Knights Templar (29 page)

Sherlock Holmes said that it was a capital mistake to theorize before one had information. My old sergeant, back when I was learning the trade, told me to catch some sleep whenever I could. I dozed my way over the Atlantic and didn’t wake up until we hit JFK.

Customs inspection was smooth and uneventful—I had only one piece of carry-on luggage, with nothing in it that the customs people might recognize as a weapon. I took the third cab in the rank outside the terminal and was on my way. First stop was at The Cloisters in Fort Tryon Park, to pay my respects to the Magdalene Chalice. My arrival would be noted there, and the contact would come soon.

Outside the museum I got another cab to Central Park West. I made my way to the Rambles, that part of the park where the city can’t be seen and you can almost imagine yourself in the wilderness.

Sure enough, a man was waiting. He wore the signs, the air, and the majesty. I made a quiet obeisance, just to go by the book, and he responded. But I didn’t need any of the signals in order to recognize one of the two masters.

There are only three and thirty of us in the inner Temple, plus the masters. We’re the part of the Temple that’s hidden from all the other Knights Templar: the secret from the holders of the secrets, the ace up the sleeve. All of us warriors, all of us priests. We serve, we obey. When needed, we kick ass.

“Hello,” he said. “It’s been years.”

“Sure has, John,” I replied. “What’s up?”

We spoke in Latin, for the same reason the Church does. No matter where you are or where you’re from, you can communicate.

“There’s a problem,” he said. “Over on the East Side.”

The Grail. It had to be. “Instructions?”

“Go in, check it out, report back.”

“Anything special I’m looking for?”

“No,” he said. “Just be aware that the last three people who got those same orders haven’t reported in yet.”

We nodded to each other and parted. I walked south. There are a bunch of hotels along Central Park South, and I wanted to hit the bar in one of them and do some thinking. For Prester John to be away from Chatillon meant that things were more serious than I’d suspected.

I sat in the bar at the Saint Moritz, drinking Laphroaig neat the way God and Scotland made it, while I wondered what in the name of King Anfortas could be going on over at the UN, and how I was going to check. Halfway down the bar another man sat playing with the little puddle of water that had collected around the base of his frosty mug of beer. He was drinking one of those watery American brews with no flavor, no body, and no strength to recommend it, though it had apparently gotten him half plowed regardless. After a minute or two I realized what had drawn my attention: He was tracing designs in the water on the bar.

Designs I recognized. Runes.

Did they think I was blind, I wondered, or so ignorant that I wouldn’t notice? But I didn’t perceive any immediate danger, and a sudden departure would tip my hand to whoever was watching. Maybe this guy was just a random drunk who happened to know his mystic symbols.

Sure, and maybe random drunks had nailed three other knights.

No, more likely he was a Golden Dawner or a Luciferian. Probably a Luciferian. Lucies have a special relationship with the Grail, or they think they do. I tipped up the last drops of Laphroaig, harsh on my tongue like a slurry of ground glass and peat moss, called for another shot, and drank half of it. The money lying by the shot glass would pay for my drink. I left the bar, left the hotel, turned east, and started walking. Leaving good booze unfinished is a venial sin, but that way it’d look like I’d just stepped over to the men’s room and was coming back soon—good for a head start.

Halfway down the block I spotted a convenient bunch of construction barriers. I ducked behind them, and as soon as I was out of sight from the street, my left hand darted into my bag. A couple of seconds to work the charm and I stepped out onto the sidewalk, Tarnkappe fully charged and ready in my hand. My bag remained behind, looking for anyone without True Sight like a rotting sack of garbage.

There are only three Tarnkappen in the world, and I had one of them. Something like that can come in handy in my line of work, and it was about to come in handy again. I walked slowly until I was sure that anyone following me from the Saint Moritz was on my tail. Then I cruised eastward, window-shopping. Windows make great mirrors to show what’s behind you—and sure enough, here came my runic friend, Mr. Beer.

I turned a few random corners to make certain he was following, then got into a crowd and slipped on the Kappe. A few seconds later, after a bit of fancy footwork to make sure that my location and method weren’t revealed by a trail of people tripping over nothing, I leaned against the side of a building and watched to see what would happen next.

Mr. Beer was confused, all right. He cast up and down the street a bit, but pretty soon he figured out that he’d botched the job. He stepped into a phone booth, then punched in a string and spoke a couple of words. His face was at the wrong angle for lipreading, but I could guess what he was saying: “I lost him.”

Maybe I couldn’t see what he was saying, but I’d managed to get the number he’d dialed. The whole time he was on the phone, I was on the other side of the street with a small pair of binoculars. He hadn’t shielded the button pad with his hand. Half trained—a Lucie, for sure.

I trailed him until he went into a hotel and up to a room. Then I slipped the Kappe into my back pocket and followed that up by slipping a few quick questions to people who didn’t even know afterward that they’d been questioned. Before long I knew that Beer’s name was Max Lang, that he spoke with a foreign accent, that he’d been there for one week and planned to stay for another, and that he tipped well.

I left him in the hotel. The trail had taken me to the Waldorf-Astoria in midtown. Might as well head over to the United Nations building. It was still early, with lots of light in the sky and lots of people on the sidewalk. I kept my eyes open, but I didn’t pick up a tail.

I turned the problem over in my mind. Max Lang couldn’t have found his way out of a paper bag if you gave him a map and printed instructions. So how did he find me in the bar? And how did he come to know the Therion rune sequence?

The UN building stands towering over FDR Drive, along the East River. Security there is tight by American standards, which means laughable for anyplace else in the world. Inside the building I knew which way to go, and I had passes that were as good as genuine to get me anywhere I needed.

I stood for a moment just inside the metal detectors at the front doors, feeling with my senses. Was there something wrong in the building? Nothing big enough to show up without a divination, and I doubted that the guards would let me get away with performing one here, even if they weren’t bent to the left—and with three knights missing already, only a fool wouldn’t assume that the guards were bent. Prester John doesn’t use fools. I headed for the Meditation Room.

The Meditation Room was right where I’d left it last time I’d been in town. No obvious problems. I went in. Everything was still in place. There was the mural in the front of the room, with its abstract picture of the sun, half dark, and half light. Cathar symbolism, and Manichean before that. We kept the picture up there to remind the Cathars how wrong they’d been. And there was the Grail—a natural lodestone, cut and polished into a gleaming rectangular block.

Wolfram von Eschenbach let the cat out of the bag when he wrote
Parzival,
back in the twelve hundreds. Somehow he’d gotten the straight word on what the Grail looked like. According to the Luciferians, who claim to know the inside story, the Grail had been the central stone in Lucifer’s crown, back before he had a couple of really bad days and got his dumb ass tossed out of Heaven. When Lucifer landed in Hell, they say, the Grail landed on Earth.

What
was
true was that the Grail had banged around the Middle East for quite a while—capstone of the Great Pyramid, cornerstone of the Temple of Solomon, that sort of thing. Back during the Crusades we’d been given the keeping of it. We never could hide the fact that there was a Grail, or that it was holy, but for a long time we tried to get people to go looking for dinnerware. Then someone talked. Somewhere, somehow, there was a leak. And blunders, like I said, never go away.

So far, though, everything looked all peachy-keen and peaceful at the United Nations. The room, the mural, the big chunk of polished rock. I pulled out a little pocket compass. Yep, that was still a lodestone over there.

One more test. I opened the little gold case in my pants pocket and slipped out a consecrated Host. I palmed it, then walked past the Grail on my way out of the room. My hand brushed the polished stone as I went by. Then I was out of the room, heading for the main doors and the street.

I raised my hand to straighten my hair, and as my hand passed my lips, I took the Host. Then I knew there was something really, desperately wrong. No taste of blood.

Hosts bleed when they touch the Holy Grail. Don’t ask me how; I’m not enough of a mystic to answer. But I do know why—Godhood in the presence of Itself makes for interesting physical manifestations.

There was a stone back there in the meditation room. But either it wasn’t the real Grail, or it wasn’t holy anymore.

Whoever did this was far more powerful than I’d imagined. They either had to smuggle a six-and-a-half-ton block of rock into the UN, and smuggle another six-and-a-half-ton block of rock out of there without anyone noticing, or they had to defile something that had never been defiled—not even on Friday the 13th, when some men with real power and knowledge had given it their best shot and come away with nothing but their own sins to show for the effort.

I had to report back. Prester John needed to know about this as soon as possible.

That was when they hit me, just as I stepped out onto the street. I felt a light impact on the side of my neck, like a mosquito. I slapped at it by reflex, but before my hand got there, my knees were already buckling. Two men moved in on either side of me, supporting me. My eyes were open, and I could see and remember, but my arms and legs weren’t responding anymore.

“Come on,” the man on my right said. “You’re going for a little ride.”

They walked me across the plaza, three men holding hands. No one looked twice. You see some funny things in New York.

They put me in the back of a limo. Another man was behind the wheel, waiting for them. The door shut and we pulled away from the curb. The guy on my right pushed my head down so I wasn’t visible from outside, which meant I couldn’t see where they were taking me, either.

We crossed a bridge—I could hear it humming in the tires—then slowed to join other traffic. I pulled inside myself and looked for where the poison was in my body. It was potent, but there couldn’t be much of it. I could handle not-much.

With enough concentration some people can slow their heartbeat down to where doctors can’t detect it. Other people can slow their breathing to where they can make a coffinful of air last a week. I concentrated on finding all the molecules of poison in my bloodstream and making Maxwell’s Demon shunt them off to somewhere harmless.

Little finger of my left hand, say. Let it concentrate there and not get out.

The car was slowing again. Stopping. Too soon. I hadn’t gotten all the poison localized yet.

They pulled me out of the backseat. We were on a dock, probably on Long Island. No one else was in sight. I could see now what was going to happen: Into the water, the current carries me away, I’m too weak to swim, I drown. The poison is too dilute, or it breaks down, or it’s masked by the by-products of decomposition and the toxicological examination doesn’t find it at the autopsy.

They weren’t asking any questions. Instead, we went out to the end of the pier, them walking and me being walked. Two of them held me out over the water while the third—the one who’d been the driver—spoke.

“We do not slay thee. Thy blood is not on us. We desire no earthly thing: Go to God with all ye possess. Sink ye or swim ye, thou art nothing more to us.”

A roaring sounded in my ears, and I was falling forward. Water, cold and salt, rushed into my nose and mouth.

Human bodies float in salt water.
Concentrate on moving the poison. Give me enough control that I can float on my back
… I was sinking. The light was growing dim. I concentrated on lowering my need for oxygen, lowering my heartbeat, lowering everything.

Move the poison. Don’t use air. Float.

Then it was working. I could feel strength and control return to my arms and legs. I was deep underwater. I opened my eyes and looked around. I saw shadow and pilings not too far away: the bottom of the pier.

Swim that way—slowly—keep the poison in the left little finger. Don’t use air. Then float up.

I didn’t dare gasp for breath when I got to the surface. For all I knew, my assailants were still up there waiting. Slowly, quietly, I allowed my lungs to empty, then fill again. I hooked my left arm around the nearest piling, then reached down with my right hand and undid a shoelace. I hoped I wouldn’t lose the shoe.

Using the lace, I tied a tourniquet around my left little finger—now the drug couldn’t get out—and reached down again to my belt. The buckle hid a small push-dagger, made of carbonite so metal detectors wouldn’t pick it up. Don’t let the material fool you; it’s hard and sharp. I cut the end of my little finger, held the knife between my teeth, and squeezed out the poisoned blood. The blood came out thick and dark, trailing away in the water like a streamer of red. Then I unloosed the tourniquet and it was time to go.

The foot of the pier was set in a cement wall about seven feet high, but the wall was old and crumbling. I got a fingerhold, then a foothold. At last I was out of the water. I crawled up until I was lying on top of the wall, under the decking of the pier. Anyone looking for me would have to be in the water to see me. I stayed there, waiting and listening, for a hundred heartbeats, then two hundred, and heard nothing but waves lapping up against the wall.