Tales of the Knights Templar (30 page)

A sound. A board creaked on the dock. They’d left someone behind, all right—someone waiting like I was, only not so quietly.

But those cowboys had been a little slack. Either they’d trusted their drug too much, or else it was really important to their ritual that I keep all my possessions. The end result was the same: I hadn’t been searched. When I reached a hand down to my pocket, the Tarnkappe was still where I’d stuffed it when I’d gotten done with Max Lang.

A visit to Lang looked like it was in the cards. Later. There were other things to do first.

I put on the Kappe, then crawled out of my hiding place and up onto the shore. There he was, out on the pier: a man in a business suit, carrying a Ruger mini-14 at high port. I sat on the shore, hoping I’d dry out enough so that water drops splashing on the pavement wouldn’t give me away. Or chattering teeth—the sun was heading down and it was going to get cold pretty soon for a man in wet clothes.

Whatever those lads had hit me with, it’d left me with the beginning of a king-of-hell headache. I ignored the discomfort and concentrated on the man on the pier. Who was he? I’d never seen him before.

I heard the second man coming before I saw him, tramping heavy-footed down the road to the pier. He walked out and greeted the first. This time I could read their lips: “Time to go … there’s a meeting … yes, we both have to be there … forget him, he’s gone.”

They walked back off the pier and I swung in behind them, letting the sound of their footfalls cover mine.

They had a car parked up the way—not the one that had brought me here. This one had two bucket seats up in front and nothing behind. They got inside; I got up on the back bumper and leaned forward across the trunk, holding on with arms spread wide. The car pulled away. All I had to do now was stay on board until they got to wherever they were going. That, and hope the Tarnkappe didn’t come off at highway speeds.

The first sign we came to told me that I was NOW LEAVING BABYLON, NEW YORK. Babylon. Figures. Nothing happens by chance, not when you have the Grail involved. It all means something. The trick is finding out what.

This pair wasn’t real gabby. I’d hoped to do some more lipreading in the rearview mirror, but as far as I could tell they drove back to the Big Apple in stony silence. They took the Midtown Tunnel back in, then local streets to somewhere on the East Side around 70th street. That was where I had my next bit of bad luck.

Out on the highway, the Tarnkappe had stuck on my head like glue. But here in the concrete canyons, a side gust took it away and there I was in plain view on the back deck. All I could do was roll off and scuttle for safety between the rushing cars, while taxis screamed at me and bicycle messengers tried to leave tire stripes up my back.

I made it to the other side of the street. The Tarnkappe was gone, blown who-knows-where by the wind, and I couldn’t make myself conspicuous by doubling back to look for it. A quick stroll around the corner, down one subway entrance and up another, and I was as safe as I could hope to be with my shoes squishing seawater.

I started out at a New Yorker’s street pace for the spot where I’d ditched my bag. By now the sun was down for real and the neon darkness was coming up: a bad time of day for strangers to go wandering around Central Park. Me, I kind of hoped someone would try for a mugging. I had a foul mood to work off, and smashing someone’s face in the name of righteousness would just about do the trick.

Nobody tried anything, and my bag was waiting where I’d left it. I changed clothes right there in the alley, and debated reporting in. But someone had gone to a lot of trouble to make me vanish, and I wanted the secret of my survival to be shared by the minimum number.

Sure, I had my orders. But blind obedience isn’t what the Temple needs from the thirty and three. Distasteful as I found the possibility, I had to consider whether I’d been sold out from inside. If so, then reporting in would be a very bad idea.

Maybe those other three knights had figured things out the same way. They could be lying low and saying nothing until the situation clarified. But I didn’t think it was likely. Odds were that they were sweating it out in Purgatory right now—like I’d be, if I didn’t start taking precautions.

I began by using the kit in my bag to make a few changes to my appearance. No sense having everyone who’d already seen me recognize me the next time I showed up. Meanwhile, it was dinner time, which meant there was a good chance that my Mr. Lang would be away from his room. A search might show me something useful. And when he got back from dinner, I wanted to ask him some questions.

The rooms at his hotel had those new-style keycards with the magnetic strip. Some people think the keycards are secure, and they’ll probably stop the teenagers who bought a Teach Yourself Locksmithing course out of the back of a comic book. The one on Lang’s room didn’t even slow me down.

Lang wasn’t out, after all. He was in the room, but I wasn’t going to get any answers out of him without a Ouija board. He was naked, lying on his back in the bathtub. Someone had been there before me—someone with a sharp knife and a sick imagination.

I dipped my finger in the little bottle of chrism I carry in my tote and made a quick cross on his forehead.

“For thy sins I grant thee absolution,” I muttered—wherever he’d gone, he needed all the help he could get. Lucies aren’t famed for their high salvation rate.

Then I searched the room, even though whoever had taken care of Lang would have done that job once already. Aside from the mess in the bathtub, the contents of the hotel room didn’t have much to say about anything, except maybe the banality of evil: no address books; no letters or memos; no telltale impressions on the memo pad. Nothing of any interest at all.

Then I found something, taped to the back of a drawer. My unknown searcher had missed it. Or maybe he’d left it behind, having no use for it—he hadn’t used bullets on Lang, only the knife. But there it was, a Colt Commander, a big mean .45 automatic.

I checked it over. Five rounds in the magazine, one up the spout. Weapon cocked, safety off. I lowered the hammer to half-cock and took the Colt with me, stuffing it in my waistband in the back, under the sport coat I was wearing. That lump of cold metal made me feel a lot better about the rest of the evening.

One more thing to do: I picked up the room phone, got an outside line, and punched in the number Lang had called that afternoon. After two rings, someone picked it up.

“International Research,” said a female voice.

“This is Max,” I said, my voice as muffled as I could make it. “I’m in trouble.”

Then I hung up.

Before I left the room, I opened the curtains all the way. Then I eased myself out of the hotel and over to a vantage point across the street, where a water tower on a lower building gave me a view of the room I’d just left. The bad guys who’d tried to drown me hadn’t taken my pocket binoculars, either. Those were good optics—when I used the binocs to look across the street, it was like I was standing in the hotel room.

I waited. The wind was cold, and a little after one in the morning it started to rain. It was just past 4
A.M
., at that hour before dawn when sick men die, when I spotted something happening.

Across the street the door eased open, then drifted shut. A woman walked into the room. She was tall, slender, and stacked. Black lace-up boots, tight black jeans, tight black sweater. Single strand of pearls. Red hair, long enough to sit on, loose down her back. A black raincoat hung over her right arm. She was wearing black leather gloves. In her left hand she had a H&K nine-millimeter. Color coordinated: The artillery was black, too.

She did a walk-through of the room. Nothing hurried. I watched her long enough that I could recognize her again, and then I was sliding down from my perch. The lady had carried a raincoat. If she planned to go out into the weather, I was going to find out where she was headed. My guess was that she was from International Research, whoever they really were.

I was betting that she’d come out the main door. So I did a slow walk up and down the street, one sidewalk and then the other, before I spotted her through the glass in the lobby, putting on that coat. Then she was out the revolving door and away.

One nice thing about New York is that it’s possible to follow someone on foot. The car situation is so crazy that no one brings a private vehicle onto the island if they can help it. She might still call a cab, but if she did, so could I. I’ve never yet in my career told a cabbie to “Follow that car,” but there’s a first time for everything.

I wasn’t going to get the chance tonight. A limo was cruising up the street at walking speed, coming up behind the lady in black. I recognized it. The boys who’d grabbed me yesterday had used that car or one just like it to carry me out to Babylon for sacrifice.

The car stopped and the two clowns in the back got out. They looked like the same pair of devout souls who’d invited me to a total-immersion baptism. It was time for me to join the fun. I angled across the rain-soaked street, pulling that big-ass Colt into my hand as I went.

The two goons had caught up with the lady, but she wasn’t going as quietly as I had the day before. Maybe they’d missed with their drugged dart—she was muffled to the nose in her raincoat, with the collar turned up. Or maybe they wanted her talkative when they got wherever they were going. No matter. They were distracted, and the driver was watching the show.

I came up beside the window out of his blind spot. Using the .45 as a pair of knucks, I punched right through the glass into the back of his head. Then I pulled the door open and him out with it, spilling him onto his back in the street. I kicked him once on the point of the chin while he lay there.

“For these and all thy sins I absolve thee,” I muttered, making a cross over him with the Colt.

The whole thing hadn’t taken more than a couple of seconds, and now it was time to go help the lady. Generally speaking I’m not the kind of knight who goes around rescuing damsels in distress—but I wanted to talk with this one, and keeping her alive was the only way to go.

I used the roof of the car as a vaulting horse and landed feet first on top of one of the goons, bringing him down with me in a tangle of arms and legs. It took me a second to extricate myself, with elbows, knees, and the heavy automatic smashing into my man along the way. He got in a couple of good licks, then gave up all interest and started holding what was left of his nuts.

Meanwhile the lady in black was doing the best she could. But her little nine-millimeter was caught under the raincoat, and the man who had her was too strong. He’d thrown an arm around her neck in the classic choke come-along and was dragging her into the backseat. Maybe he hadn’t noticed that the driver wasn’t there anymore.

I took him in the back of the skull with the butt of the Colt Commander. He slipped to the ground to join his moaning pal.

“Come on!” I yelled at the lady. “Let’s get out of here!”

“Where to?” she gasped.

“Into the car.”

I slid behind the wheel—the keys were still in the ignition and the engine was turning over—and slammed the driver’s-side door. The lady didn’t argue. She got in beside me and closed the other door, and I took off from the curb.

I made a left turn across traffic into a side street, and said, “Where to, sister?”

“Who are you?”

Rather than give her an answer, I said, “The cops are gonna be all over this block in a couple of minutes—I saw the doorman go running inside like a man with 911 on his mind. You got a safe place to go?”

She gave an address down in SoHo. I drove to the address, ditched the car, and went with her up to an apartment: third floor of a brownstone, three rooms and a kitchen. I hoped she was in a rent-controlled building, or this place would be costing her a pretty.

The apartment was almost empty: nothing but a coffeemaker in the kitchen, a couple of sofas, and a bed, all visible from right inside the front door.

“Take a seat,” she said. “I’ll make coffee.”

She stripped off her coat and turned to hang it on a peg by the door. When she turned back, the little nine-millimeter was pointing right between my eyes. I’d stuffed the .45 into my waistband in back again, to keep her from getting nervous. Her get nervous? That was a laugh.

“You’ve missed three recognition signals,” she said. “You aren’t from Section. So how’s about you tell me who you are?”

“People call me Crossman,” I said. “Peter Grossman.”

“Is that your real name?”

“No, but it’ll do. I’m the connection for midtown. You want coke, you call me.”

“Your kind isn’t known for making citizen arrests,” she said. The muzzle of the nine-millimeter never wavered, even though from the way her chest was going up and down she had to be nervous about something. “What did you think you were up to tonight?”

“Someone who doesn’t work for me using muscle in my territory, that interests me. Let one bunch get away with it, pretty soon it’s all over town that Crossman’s gone soft, and they’re all trying to move in. Can’t let that happen.”

“So—” she started, but never finished. A knock sounded on the door.

“Maggie,” came a voice from outside. “Maggie, I know you’re in there. Open up.”

She made the little pistol vanish. “Come on in—it isn’t locked.”

The door swung open, and I got a sinking feeling in my guts. The Mutt and Jeff act waiting on the landing were the same pair who’d given me the ride back to town the day before. The watchers from the dock in Babylon. I didn’t think they recognized me—the Tarakappe had kept me invisible at first, and then I’d changed my face. I was glad now that I’d taken the precaution.

They came in. They were wrapped in dripping raincoats—no way of telling what kind of firepower they were carrying underneath, but it would take ’em a while to pull anything clear. The first guy, the short one, nodded over at me. “Who’s the meat?”

“A guy named Crossman,” Maggie said. “He’s some kind of drug lord. Showed up tonight and pulled my buns out of a bad situation while you two were sucking down cold ones in some bar.”