The Templar's Secret (The Templar Series) (15 page)

Heaving in pain, he staggered to his feet.
Bruised all the way to the marrow, I’ll warrant.
Still determined to speak to his adversary, Caedmon turned towards the other man, who stood at the ready, capably grasping a five-foot-long pole. Hoping that actions spoke louder than words, Caedmon held out both hands, palms upward. The age-old gesture that he meant no harm. That he wanted to call a temporary truce.

‘We need to talk.
Please
,’ he implored. ‘I have vital information to convey to you.’

Sneering, the Bête Noire hissed, ‘After I crack open your skull, you can tell it to the devil, English!’ Holding the five-foot-pole in a two-handed grip, the brute swung high.

Caedmon ducked low, the pole slicing through the air above his head and missing its intended target by a scant inch.
Too damned close for comfort.

Still bent over,
Caedmon charged his opponent, ramming his head into the other man’s lower belly. Plowing forward, he didn’t stop until he’d hammered his foe’s backside against the wall. Wood splintered and cracked. Pinned in place, the Bête Noire slammed the metal pole against Caedmon’s upper back, knocking the wind out of him.

Gasping for breath,
Caedmon managed to hook first his right hand, then his left, on to the pole. For several seconds they violently grappled for control of the weapon.

I need to end this. Now!

Caedmon pushed with all his might, thrusting the horizontal pole into the other man’s torso. A low grunt ensued. Then a harsh groan. That being his cue, Caedmon straightened his spine and viciously ripped the pole from the other man’s grasp.

Furious, he hurled the pole across the warehouse, embedding the rod into a sack of spice. As he took the Bête Noire’s measure, their eyes made contact. There was no mistaking the rabid hatred in the other man’s narrowed gaze.

Bull-like, the mustachioed brute snorted through flared nostrils. ‘
Tú eres un cabrón!
’

‘
Yes, I’m a right fucking bastard,’ Caedmon retorted impatiently, not in the mood for any macho posturing. ‘Be that as it may, I can assure you that what I have to say is crucially important.’ He swiped at a wet ribbon of blood that coursed down the side of his face from an open gash on his temple.

The Bête
Noire glanced at the pole protruding from the burlap bag. ‘You should have held on to that, English.’ Admonition issued, he grabbed his crotch and sneered . . . just before he sprinted towards the stairs.

God
Almighty!

His energy
dissipating, Caedmon staggered after the fleeing man, refusing to call retreat. Hands braced on either side of the stairwell, he pounded down the flight of rickety steps, determined to catch his opponent.

‘
Wait! I have a message for Irenaeus!’ he shouted in desperation as he neared the bottom of the stairs. ‘It’s imperative that you –’

Just then, the sole of his leather shoe punched through a weakened stair tread. Unable to stop his downward momentum,
Caedmon was propelled forward. One foot stuck in the shattered tread, the other one slid out from under him.

Collapsing on the floor in a contorted sprawl, he screamed in agony.

‘Christ! I’ve broken my ankle!’

‘
Caedmon is chasing down a lead and, well, I’m not exactly sure when he’ll be returning to the hotel,’ Edie hedged, shading the truth so that she wouldn’t unduly worry Gita Patel.

Recalling the fierce look on
Caedmon’s face before he’d charged out of the café, Edie’s own fear mushroomed anew. The mustachioed ‘Bête Noire’, as Caedmon referred to him, had obviously followed them back to Fort Cochin.

‘
That’s why I’m here,’ Gita said, clearly excited about something. Unsnapping her leather messenger bag, she removed her laptop computer. ‘I’ve also been chasing down a lead. Quite by accident, I discovered additional information about the Knight Templar, Fortes de Pinós.’ Prying the computer open, she hit the ON switch.

Encouraged by the other woman’s enthusiasm, Edie scooted her chair a few inches closer to the laptop.

Having run into each other several minutes ago in the lobby, the two of them were now seated at a small table on the veranda of the Old Lighthouse Hotel, a white stucco remnant from the British colonial period. The outdoor lounge, shaded by spatula-leafed peepal trees, was surrounded by the hotel’s magnificent grounds. Just beyond the lush ferns and flowering plants, the hotel’s private beach was visible, the Arabian Sea sparkling in the late-day sun.

‘I just need
to boot-up and log on to the Internet,’ Gita said, sliding a pair of sunglasses on to the top of her head; her hair, dark and shiny as a crow’s wing, was pulled into a no-nonsense bun.

Attired in a traditional unbleached Keralean sari with woven bands shot through with golden thread and a red bindi dot between her brows, Gita was certainly different
-looking to when Edie first met her in Paris, the change from west to east startling. The only thing that hadn’t changed were the swollen hazel eyes rimmed with dark circles.
Too many tears and not enough sleep
,
Edie thought.

A
waistcoated server approached. With a crisp economy of motion, he placed two napkins, an iced latte and a cup of chai on the table.

Edie
immediately reached for the sugar bowl. ‘I know. It’s a sacrilege to be drinking coffee in a country famous for its tea, but jet lag is about to get the better of me.’

Nodding sympathetically, Gita said, ‘I understand. For the last five days, I’ve been subsisting on chai and cigarettes.’

‘You smoke cigarettes?’ Edie tried to visualize it, but couldn’t bring the image to mind. Somehow it didn’t jive with the sari and bindi dot.

‘Although it’s still something of a taboo in India for women to smoke, I picked up a few packs at Charles de Gaulle airport,’ Gita confessed, her cheeks flushed with
color. ‘I’d read somewhere that cigarettes calm the nerves.’ She raised the tea cup to her lips and took a measured sip. ‘Maybe I’m not smoking enough.’

In all honesty,
Edie didn’t know how the woman was coping emotionally, unable to fathom the torment that Gita had been made to endure since Anala’s abduction. ‘
Whatever gets you through the night . . .
’

Sugar her drug of choice, Edie reached for the bottle of
flavored syrup, adding a sweetened spurt to her beverage.

As they waited for the computer to boot up,
Edie decided to throw caution to the Indian wind and ask a question that had been niggling since Paris. ‘I’m curious . . . what was Caedmon like when you knew him at Oxford? He rarely talks about his past.’

Gita lowered her tea cup. For an infinitesimal second, her brow wrinkled before again smoothing out.
‘Caedmon would probably cringe to hear me say this, but he was sweetly demonstrative. The snobbery at Oxford could, at times, be breathtaking, yet he possessed none of the conceited pretensions of his peers. In that bastion of conformity, he was very much his own person.’ Her lips curved ever so slightly. A ghost of a smile. ‘Do you by any chance know what the name “Anala” means in Sanskrit?’

Curious, Edie shook her head. ‘I have no idea.’

‘It means fire. I used to tell Caedmon that he had red hair because he burned with an inner fire. After I became pregnant, my father prohibited me from mentioning his name,’ she confessed in a hoarse tone of voice, one tinged with sadness. ‘Naming our daughter Anala was my clandestine way of giving her –’ Clearing her throat, Gita waved away the thought. ‘Twenty-two years is a lifetime. What’s he like now?’

The other woman having deftly turned the tables, Edie smiled, more than happy to return the
favor. ‘He’s still an iconoclast. And, yes, he still has an inner fire, but it’s tempered with the courage of conviction.’ Although tempted, Edie refrained from mentioning that on occasion the ‘fire’ burned out of control. As it did earlier when Caedmon charged out of the café. ‘And just so you know, Caedmon has book smarts
and
street smarts,’ she added, to reassure herself as much as Gita.

‘When I first discovered that Anala had
been abducted from the house, I . . . I didn’t know who else to turn to,’ Gita whispered, hazel eyes welling with tears.

Hearing that, Edie intuited that Gita Patel also had no one to turn to emotionally; that she’d been going through this hellish nightmare all alone. Suddenly feeling a deep connection to the dark-haired, teary-eyed woman in
the beautiful sari, Edie reached across the table and pressed Gita’s hands between hers.

‘
Trust me. Caedmon
will
do everything in his power to find the
Evangelium Gaspar
.’ Giving Gita’s hands a consoling squeeze, Edie wordlessly handed her a clean napkin.

‘
Forgive me . . . I’m a mess.’ As she wiped her cheeks, Gita smiled weakly, clearly embarrassed that she’d lost control of her emotions.

‘
No need to apologize. In fact, I’m impressed with how well you’re keeping it together.’

More composed, Gita began tapping away on the computer keyboard. ‘It won’t take but a moment for me to pull up the file.’

‘Great. I’m interested to see what you found.’ Leaning forward, Edie peered at the computer screen and read through the particulars. Finished, she glanced over at Gita and grinned. ‘Ohmygod . . . you hit the jackpot.’

‘
It’s your lucky day,
cabrón
,’ the Bête Noire rasped. On the verge of swinging an old-fashioned metal scale at Caedmon’s head, he instead flung the heavy device aside. He then glanced dismissively at the two Indian men who, hearing Caedmon’s agonized scream, had rushed to the scene. Sneering at the pair, the brute stormed out of the spice warehouse.

‘
But not so lucky for you,’ Caedmon muttered, still sprawled at the bottom of the stairs.

The ruse having worked, he gratefully allowed the two
men to assist him to his feet. Brushing the dust off his trousers, he thanked each man in turn before rushing outside. Worried that he wouldn’t be able to overtake the Bête Noire, when his shoe lodged in the stair tread he’d impetuously feigned a broken limb. It seemed the most expedient way to pursue without all of the huffing and puffing. He could now surreptitiously follow the other man to his lair while conserving his energy for the next bout.

Keeping to the shadows,
Caedmon hurried down the lane that ran through the middle of the spice bazaar, the Bête Noire approximately fifty meters ahead of him. Arms swinging, torso listing in a macho swagger, the Spanish-speaking tough was blithely unaware that Caedmon had risen from the deep and now followed in his wake.

The fact that
the man
did
speak Spanish, as well as heavily accented English, was an inexplicable, but nagging detail.

Still concealed in the umbra,
Caedmon rounded the corner and continued to follow his quarry through a marketplace. Closed for business, the stalls were shuttered and locked. Only a few loiterers ambled along the pavement. Completely taken in by Caedmon’s ploy, the cocky bastard didn’t once turn and peer in the opposite direction.

It’s that sort of smug hubris that
can get a man killed
, Caedmon mused.

Passing a
derelict truck parked on the curb, hanks of green and red beads dangling from the windows, he stepped over to the rear passenger bumper. Hope springing, he reached under the grimy protrusion. With his arm extended, he rummaged around and –
perfect!
– slid a blackened tire iron out of the metal rings securing it to the vehicle’s underside. Weapon at the ready, he picked up the pace, the Bête Noire having veered on to a cross street.

By the time
he reached the intersection, the bruiser was nowhere in sight.

Bloody hell.

Worried the fish may have escaped the trawl, he hurriedly made his way down the litter-strewn lane that was framed on either side by wooden shanties; derelict structures that he suspected had never seen better days. India’s squalor was not for the faint hearted, the stench enough to make a weaker man bend over and retch. As it was, he had to put the back of his free hand to his nostrils to block out the smell of the alley which was a putrid effluvium awash in raw sewage, rubbish and the odd animal carcass.

The Jewel in the Crown, my arse.

Day fast fading, murky gray shadows materialized. Sensing something in the gloaming, he raised the tire iron.

Only to
lower it an instant later when two pathetically thin, doe-eyed boys scampered out of a doorway.

The taller of the two lads whipped
out an accordion-style souvenir book. ‘Very nice. Very nice. Only twenty rupees,’ he informed Caedmon, holding the book up for inspection. ‘Good buy!’

‘I’ll give you the twenty rupees, but first you must answer a few questions.’