The Templar Throne (26 page)

A servant appeared with a tray, a heavy ceramic ashtray and two tall glasses. One was a raspberry-colored negroni and the other was a rusty- looking Long Island iced tea. The servant placed the Long Island iced tea and the ashtray in front of Brennan and the negroni in front of the cardinal. The servant bowed slightly to the cardinal and then withdrew. The two men at the table sat silently for a moment, watching the chips of light dancing randomly across the swimming pool. Finally, with a certain regret in his voice, the cardinal spoke.

“Have you discovered anything new?”

“After escaping from the lake property they took a train to Halifax, Nova Scotia.”

“A train?” Spada asked, surprised.

“Quite smart, really,” replied Brennan. The priest took a long swallow of his drink. “No airport security, no identification required to purchase tickets, no railway police to speak of, not on the trains at any rate.”

“Are they still there?”

“They met with a man named Gallant.”

“Who is he?” Spada asked.

“A fisherman. A lobster catcher, to be specific.”

“A fisherman?”

“This man Gallant has a somewhat dubious reputation,” said Brennan. He butted his cigarette in the ashtray and lit another. “He is rumored to smuggle things between Maine and Nova Scotia: cigarettes, cheap Canadian pharmaceuticals and the like. Now he’s vanished along with his boat. So have Holliday and the woman.”

“Could he be smuggling them into the United States?”

“It’s a possibility. The normal crossings have become much more difficult to breach with everyone needing passports on both sides of the border.”

“But why now?” Spada asked. “To give up their quest at this stage doesn’t seem logical.”

“Perhaps they were frightened off by the attack at the lake property,” suggested Brennan.

Spada sipped his mouth-puckering drink and shook his head. “There is the fundamental problem of why they went to Canada in the first place,” said the cardinal. “And why this Braintree?”

“Braintree was a colleague of Holliday’s uncle. He’s helped Holliday before.”

“Ah, yes,” Spada said and nodded. “The infamous Henry Granger, spy, Nazi killer, academician and the last of the Templars all in one.”

Brennan’s thin lips twisted into a grimace. He spoke darkly. “Not the last Templar, we know that much at least, thanks to the efforts of his nephew, Lieutenant Colonel Holliday.”

The expression on Brennan’s face was enough to draw a smile from Cardinal Spada, something that rarely occurred these days.

“Stare calme, Tomasso, stare calme
. Holliday bested you, so accept it. You’ll have your chance at retribution, I assure you.” The cardinal thought for a moment, then spoke again. “Do you think Holliday has the slightest idea of what he’s involved with, its scope?”

“I doubt it,” replied Brennan. “He may well believe that he’s dragged the woman into his troubles rather than the other way around.”

“They have come under fire on six separate occasions since joining forces. The man who followed them in Prague, the Peseks in Venice, St. Michael’s Mount in Cornwall, the attempted kidnapping on Iona, and finally the attack in Canada. Surely he’s not so naïve that he’d think we were responsible for all of that?”

“He’s run into the Peseks before, that unfortunate series of events in Libya last year, if you’ll recall.”

“Vividly.”

Brennan lit another cigarette. “So he puts the Peseks at our doorstep and perhaps that CIA hireling in Prague. He’d almost certainly assume that the police intervention in Cornwall was concocted by the Company as well; they’re the only people who could orchestrate a thing like that so quickly.”

“And the rest?”

“He knows the failed kidnapping was by the Blackhawk people. Like an idiot the man he disposed of was carrying identification. The police questioned the man he wounded, so undoubtedly MI- 5 and hence the CIA know of their involvement.”

“Would he know about Rex Deus’s involvement with them?”

Brennan shook his head. “Blackhawk is small, nothing near the size and profile of groups like Halliburton or Blackwater.”

“Sadly, of course, we
do
know of them,” murmured the cardinal. “All too well, in fact.”

“You shouldn’t have allowed the bank to do it,” said Brennan. “If you’ll recall, I advised you of that at the time, Your Eminence.”

“There was nothing that I could do about it,” explained Spada. “RhineHydraulik and Aquadyn were both European companies and heavily invested in us. There was no way that the IOR could know that there would be a hostile takeover and consolidation of both of them by Sinclair’s company.”

“The Vatican Bank
should
know,” replied Brennan harshly.

“Did you?” Spada snapped. “The Istituto relies on you for such intelligence.”

“No,” said Brennan. “But I knew that RhineHydraulik was weak and Aquadyn was vulnerable. Again, I told you that at the time, just as I told Bertone at the bank.” The Irishman shook his head sadly.

“Now a fundamentalist Christian organization that has a private army of its own is a business partner of the Holy See. If we withdrew our interest in Rhine-Aqua in this market we’d lose billions. If Rex Deus sold their interest there would be a run on the stock and we’d lose billions again. If they want to, Rex Deus can put the entire Catholic Church into a vise.”

“I am aware of all of this,” answered Spada. “Which is precisely why we need some leverage with them
.
They must be controlled or dealt with some other way.”

Brennan looked mildly amused at the cardinal using such strong language.

“You’ll have to be clearer than that,” said the priest. “It’s not as though I’ve got too many Antonin Peseks out there. I can’t order up assassinations like a meal in a restaurant.”

“Forget that for the moment,” said the cardinal, abruptly changing the subject. “We were talking about Holliday. What about the Canadian incident?”

Brennan shrugged. “At this point it is still unclear. The group that abducted Holliday and the woman has not been identified, although it is likely that their attackers at the lakefront property were Blackhawk.” Brennan drained the last of his drink and began crunching ice cubes between his teeth.

“We’re missing something,” said the cardinal. “This is too great a concentration of force from too many directions to be about a semi- mythical religious relic.” The old man frowned, his thin lips drawn down, his eyes cold and thoughtful.

A sudden gust of wind shook the branches of the hedge around the pool. As a child Spada was sure that sound was the voices of the dead whispering and heralding disaster. He shivered, shrinking into the heavy robe. Maybe he still believed it. “Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you. Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are moth-eaten.”

“Begging your pardon, Eminence?” Brennan said, confused.

“A verse from the Holy Scripture, Father Brennan. James, chapter five to be precise.”

“I’m not sure I take your meaning.”

“This whole thing is about money. I can smell it.” The cardinal thought for a moment, his head bowed, almost as though he was at prayer, something he hadn’t done in a very long time. “A year or so ago you heard a rumor making the rounds in Washington about something called Ironstone. Sinclair’s name was involved. Did you ever discover anything else about it?”

“A little, and it wasn’t about money. As far as I know it was the code name for some kind of military response to the threat of a major act of terrorism on American soil.”

“Nothing that would affect us, though.”

“Not directly, no,” said Brennan.

A young priest appeared in the doorway into the villa. He stood hesitantly for a moment and then came forward to where Spada and Brennan were sitting. One of Brennan’s boys, certainly, if his dark good looks were anything to go by. He stopped and bowed to Spada and then turned to Brennan.

“Is ea anois, an bhféadaim cúnamh leat,
Michael?” Brennan asked. Spada smiled for the second time since Brennan had arrived. The Irishman was speaking Gaelic, a requirement for all his couriers. A nice touch for keeping secrets, even from a cardinal, like the Navaho Windtalkers used by the U.S. Marines during World War Two. The young man responded, speaking rapidly. Spada couldn’t understand a word. The message was brief. When the young man was done he bowed respectfully to Spada and then departed.

“What was that all about?” Cardinal Spada said as the young man disappeared into the darkness of the villa beyond the French doors. “Or am I allowed to ask?”

“The situation regarding Holliday has changed direction. His cousin Peggy and her husband have vanished into thin air.”

Holliday turned the elapsed time bezel on his old Luminox wristwatch for two hours and then he and Sister Meg inputted their position into the two GPS handhelds, using the larger unit on the
Deryldene D
as a base guide. According to the big unit, Lake Wallace was located a mile and a half down the beach and six hundred yards inland across the low scruffy dunes.

The weather station, which employed five of the six permanent residents of Sable Island, was a mile farther down the curving arm of the crescent. There were a small handful of offshore oil rigs in the ocean several miles away from the island, but with the sandbar already evacuated in the face of the coming hurricane it was unlikely they would be interrupted.

It took them almost half an hour to reach the turn point indicated by the GPS. The fine dark sand was more difficult to walk in than either one of them had expected. It would take another ten minutes to reach the lake. That in turn meant it would take the same amount of time, if not longer, to make the return journey, and they still hadn’t reached the lake.

That left them with an hour at most to discover an artifact that probably didn’t exist and maybe wasn’t even there—and even if it
was
there, it had been buried in the sand for seven hundred years. The odds of finding it were infinitesimal. They found a narrow windswept pathway leading up between the dunes. Finally they reached the summit and paused to take a breath.

Ahead of them now the sky on the horizon was a roiling vision of chaos, as though the sky itself was being torn and bruised. On the island they could now see the narrow oblong lake and the broad stretch of the southern beach, ten times as wide as the northern beach where the
Deryldene D
had grounded.

The sea between the beach and the horizon was a frothing horror, huge waves rising on the outer banks then roaring like freight trains across the inner sandbars to finally crash and break along the sand.

No wonder there had been so many wrecks here over the centuries; any ship foundering on the outer banks would be pounded into kindling, and anyone who survived the wreck itself would almost certainly be drowned before he reached the shore.

“This is madness,” said Holliday. “We’ll never find the damned thing. We should go back to Halifax and wait out the storm, then come back.”

“There’s no time for that,” answered Meg grimly. “The hurricane will flood into the lake and the True Ark will be under the water again.” She trudged forward, hitching her backpack higher on her shoulders, her feet sinking into the soft, fine sand. On the crest of a dune covered with some kind of thistle and rough eelgrass a trio of shaggy Sable Island ponies watched them, their long unkempt manes flying raggedly in the rising wind.

How many hurricanes and for how many generations had the wild horses’ bloodlines survived? And how could Sister Meg be so sure that the treasure her precious Blessed Juliana had brought here would be submerged? According to the book he’d read on the train, Lake Wallace had steadily been getting smaller over the passing centuries. The original high-water mark could be very high by now in relation to the modern lake.

He knew exactly why, of course, and it wasn’t the first time he’d seen the incredible streak of stubbornness coming from the red-haired nun. The iron faith of the True Believer. Darwin couldn’t be right because the Bible never mentioned evolution, dinosaurs or cave men and strongly suggested that the sun revolved around the earth. Holliday checked his watch again. He estimated that it would be another five minutes of slogging before they reached the midpoint of the lake. He made the simple calculation.

In the final analysis the trek from the
Deryldene D
would take a total of forty minutes. That would leave them with barely the same amount of time for their search if they wanted to get back to the boat within the two-hour limit. Somehow he doubted that Gallant was a great fan of grace periods.

Holliday looked out over the rolling, deep green monstrosity of the open Atlantic and the hurricane hurtling inexorably down on them. It was close enough now that he could easily see the blinding, jagged spikes of lightning flashing across the jet black base of the clouds like a Goya vision of Apocalypse.

Holliday felt something curl and curdle in his guts. Fear or warning? Maybe both. The fight- or-flight instinct the Neanderthal hunter felt when confronted by his first charging mammoth or saber- toothed Tiger. They slid down the pathway leading to the floodplain of the lake. The wind was rising in gusts, dragging up brief clouds of gritty sand into their faces. He checked his watch one more time. Another few minutes gone. He cursed under his breath. Meg half turned.

“Did you say something?”

“No, nothing,” he responded. She continued the slide down to the bottom of the dune and Holliday dutifully followed.

The hell brewing on the horizon was almost enough for him to force Meg’s hand and abandon her, but he knew he couldn’t bring himself to do it. They reached the floodplain and walked across the salt-encrusted hardpan toward the edge of the water. It was summer and the lake’s edge was fringed with grasses and other low plants.