Valley of the Templars (10 page)

“His Eminence Jaime Cardinal Ortega is an unrepentant
finocchio
and even the pope knows it,” said Spada. “What does his bum boy have to tell us—that Fidel has finally confessed his sins?” He coughed dramatically and waved his hand at the cloud of smoke from Brennan’s fuming cigarette, the ashes of which were all over the front of the priest’s wrinkled black
collarino
shirt. Brennan was standing at the ornate Italian Renaissance–style oak carved console table that served as Cardinal Spada’s bar.

“No, but someone else did.”

“Don’t keep me in suspense, Brennan. The longer our conversation goes on, the longer I have to endure the foul stench of your cigarette.”

“A sin that has haunted me since I was eight and my da gave me enough money to buy a five-pack of Gallaghers. We all have our burdens, I’m afraid.” The priest toyed with the cut-crystal stopper of a decanter of sherry on the bar for a moment.

“Get on with it,” snapped the cardinal. If the
testa di merda
wasn’t so valuable, he would have had the
little Irish
bastardo
snuffed out like a votive candle in the Sistine Chapel.

“It was some time ago in the cathedral. According to the priest, the man had been drinking and was clearly very upset. He was incoherent about most things, but the priest was able to pick up one or two things of interest. The words
Valle des Muertes
, the Valley of Death, and
Operación de Venganza
. The priest eventually reported it to me.”

“Why in the name of all that is holy would we be interested in the ravings of a drunk Cuban in his cups muttering tales of death and revenge? It sounds like one of those dreadful
romanzos
His Holiness likes to read before he goes to sleep.”

“The priest knew the man. His name was Domingo Cabrera and he works for the Cuban Department of the Interior—their DGI, the Secret Police.”

“Cabrera,” said Spada, frowning. He took off his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose with a thumb and forefinger. “Why do I know that name?”

Brennan whisked some ash off the front of his shirt and down onto the seventeenth-century Anatolian Lotto rug that covered the cardinal’s floor. “Because he is a close companion of Colonel John Holliday, whose path has crossed ours on several occasions. He cost us Pesek, the assassin, last winter and we lost any chance of ever finding the Book because of his antics in the Kremlin. He cost us Harris in Africa the year
before that and he also knows far too much about the death of the present Holy Father’s predecessor and our possible involvement in that ‘arrangement.’”

Spada laid his hands flat on the table. The liver-colored age spots were everywhere now and the veins stood out like thick wormlike cables. The skin was so thin it looked like parchment, and unless he concentrated he could no longer stop the faint, tremulous shaking. It was the very earliest stage of Parkinson’s disease, but according to the doctors, at his age the symptoms, especially the cognitive ones, would progress rapidly. He sometimes wondered why he cared so much about living and had finally concluded that it was because he was so terrified of what faced him, or did not face him, after death. He frowned. Best not to think of such things.

Carrie Pilkington had done the
New York Times
crossword puzzle that morning in six minutes and fifteen seconds. Forty-five seconds longer than the all-time world’s record but pretty good all the same, especially for a twenty-seven-year-old, fresh out of Harvard with a postgraduate degree in ethnomusicology, making her the youngest doctor of anything in the Central Intelligence Agency.

She still wasn’t sure quite how or why she’d been recruited by the Company except that a mysterious
man smoking a pipe had approached her at the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament two years ago shortly after she’d taken second place. He’d asked her if the Harvard sweatshirt was real and when she said yes he’d given her his card and wandered away into the crowd, never to be seen again.

Initially she’d gone to the recruiting seminar simply out of curiosity, but after she’d listened to the speech and gotten the booklet describing pay grades and benefits, it occurred to her that her doctorate in ethnomusicology wouldn’t give her that kind of package in a university for years and it was also beginning to look as though her best bet for employment these days was probably going to be more on the level of high school band teacher somewhere in Missouri.

She applied, was accepted and went through an orientation course that did not involve guns, knives or twenty different ways to kill someone with a soupspoon. Now here she was, manning the Netherlands desk after Bert Coptic’s unfortunate and unforeseen massive coronary “event” that left his wife to collect his pension and about three dozen hidden Snickers bar wrappers in his bottom drawer.

The Netherlands desk was hardly the beating heart of intelligence in the agency and was just about as low as you could get on the hierarchical bureaucratic ladder, but Carrie didn’t mind; over her six months
on the desk she’d noticed that Holland, and Amsterdam-Rotterdam in particular, was something of a minor crossroads in the game, like the intersection of a “Down” and an “Across” clue in a puzzle. And there was nothing Carrie Pilkington liked better than a puzzle except for that singular moment when all the pieces fit together to form a complete picture.

As intelligence analysis went, the young Miss Pilkington’s methods were seen as a little odd by most of her colleagues in the Western European Section on the third floor of the aging building in MacLean, Virginia. Carrie’s clues were gathered one by one and written cryptically on yellow Post-its in her own personal code and then stuck up on the gray metal wall of her cubicle. While other analysts pored over computers, flipped through dossiers and clipped newspapers, Carrie gathered Post-its and stared until she had enough of the little yellow squares to give her the picture on the cover of the box.

Like now.

An NSA intercept from Ramstein Air Force Base.

A car rental from Kaiserslautern, the closest town to Ramstein AFB.

A Dutch employee of the Canadian consulate in Amsterdam accused of selling passport blanks to a known document forger.

A tap on the phone line of a Dutch lawyer who was under suspicion of being a double agent.

The murder of the same known document forger as the one implicated in the case of the consulate employee.

The name and telephone number of the owner of a well-known expatriate bar found in the iPhone directory of the forger.

The resultant still photo from the expatriate bar’s security cameras after the rousting of the bar owner by the Militaire Inlichtingen en Veiligheidsdienst, the Dutch Military Intelligence and Security Service commonly known as the MIVD.

After she’d compared it to the computer dossier, the still photo was the icing on the cake. Carrie plucked all the Post-its off her cubicle wall, rearranged them in order just to make sure, then put them into her personal shredder one by one. Then she turned to the telephone.

“Tell him what you told me,” said Rufus Kingman, deputy director of operations. Kingman was the replacement for Mike Harris after that man’s defection to the dark side and his consequent dark and violent end in the bowels of central Africa. Kingman was a young man trying to be old school: dark suits, white shirts, ties with small knots and razor-cut hair. Joseph Patchin, director of operations, really was old school and he didn’t like Rufus Kingman one tiny little bit.
On the other hand, Kingman’s father was a onetime White House chief of staff and a big stick in the Pallas Group and it never hurt to have a soft place to land when you finally pulled the rip cord on the civil service parachute. Pensions weren’t what they used to be, and his divorce was eating him alive.

The young woman standing in front of him was young, pretty and dark-haired. She had the Irish good looks and long legs he’d found so attractive in his wife once upon a time, but he’d been married too long and was getting too old to care very much, which was a depressing thought all on its own.

Apparently the young lady was an analyst out of the Western European Section, an area of the Company he rarely thought about and almost never visited. Her name, according to Kingman’s quick and dirty briefing over the telephone, was Carrie Pilkington.

“Yes, Miss Pilkington?”

The girl was very straightforward and spoke without hesitation. “Colonel John Holliday and his friend Eddie Cabrera are in Cuba. Cabrera’s older brother, Domingo, has disappeared under suspicious circumstances. Domingo Cabrera is a member of the Dirección de Inteligencia, or DI, and the bodyguard and driver for Deborah Castro Espin, Raul Castro’s eldest daughter.” Carrie Pilkington paused. “Both Holliday and Cabrera are traveling on forged passports.”

“How sure are you of this information?”

“One hundred percent.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“We know Cabrera phoned from Ramstein and discovered that his brother had disappeared. We know Holliday was in Amsterdam at Darby’s expatriate bar and that he inquired after fresh documents. We know a document forger named Dirk Hartog was killed in his own workshop with his own nine-millimeter Walther PPK. Presumably he’d tried to cheat or otherwise betray Holliday and his friend.” The girl paused again. “Just before coming up here, I received confirmation from the RCMP’s Canadian Security Intelligence Service that two men answering the descriptions of Cabrera and Holliday boarded an Air Canada direct flight to Havana.”

“Is that it?” Patchin asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“Thank you for your input, Miss Pilkington.” It was a dismissal. The young woman smiled and turned with one of those pleasant little skirt flips some women’s hips can manage so easily and then she was gone. “Who’s head of analysis for the European Section?”

“His his name is Compton, sir,” said Kingman, as though the question was beneath him.

“Well, tell Compton to either fire her or transfer her because she’ll have his job in a few years.”

“Yes, sir,” said Kingman.

“That was a joke.”

“Yes, sir, very amusing.”

“Find out if the Cuban has settled in, would you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And tell Black I’d like to see him at his convenience.”

“Yes, sir.” This time it was Kingman’s cue to leave and he did, leaving Patchin alone with his very unpleasant thoughts.

The Chullima Shipyards were located at the mouth of the Almendares River on the western side of Havana just past the swing bridge and close to where the Malecon breakwater and promenade ended.

Eddie piloted the old Russian motorcycle across the swing bridge, then turned down the dirt track that led down to the sheds and wharves of the shipyards. He pulled to a stop in front of a tumbledown shed and switched off the key. It was noon and brutally hot and Holliday could feel the sweat trickling down his spine as he climbed out of the sidecar. The waterfront here was bustling and the snap of welding torches and the droning of industrial belt sanders filled the dusty air. There seemed to be a lot of laughter as men called back and forth to the tinny sound of Lady Gaga doing “Paparazzi” coming from a radio somewhere.

“So, tell me about this man Arango,” said Holliday as they made their way down the boardwalk by the riverbank.

“Montalvo Arango is a disgusting pig and a criminal,” answered Eddie, smiling broadly. “He stinks like an old fish—he drinks too much
ron
and smokes very cheap cigars. He is the true
viejo hombre del mar
, this man.” The Cuban paused and winked. “But he has a boat.”

They found both the man and the boat at the far end of the shipyard, closest to the mouth of the river. In the distance Holliday could see half a dozen men fishing from the stony beach with hand lines and rods. According to Eddie, under Cuban law what they were doing was a crime for which they could be sent to prison, the arrest and imprisonment deferred if they handed over half their catch to the policeman who caught them.

“
Buenas tardes
, Montalvo,” said Eddie. The man looked up from what he was doing. He could have been anything from seventy to a hundred and seventy. His eyelids drooped in folds over watery brown eyes and his mahogany-tanned narrow face was seamed and cut by wrinkles as deep as scars. The skin of his cheeks drooped over a bristly chin, and his neck had as many wattles as a turkey. The parts of his face not cracked and slashed by wrinkles were sprinkled with dark moles and warts from being in the bright sun for most of his life. The butt of a cigar hung wetly from his thin pursed lips. From what Holliday could see of his sideburns and the foliage sprouting from his
flat, saucerlike ears, his hair was white. The top of his head was covered by a stained and ragged fedora that looked as if it came out of a thirties gangster movie.

“Buenas tardes, Capitaine Cabrera,”
said Arango. He took the cigar stub out of his mouth and hawked a dark, mucousy mass off the side of the wharf and into the water. It was the first time Holliday had ever heard Eddie being called by his military rank.

“Qué pasa?”
Eddie asked, although it was obvious what the old man was doing. Kneeling on the concrete boardwalk with a worn blade in his gnarled hand, he was gutting a fish that had to be five feet long, thick tendrils as long as eels hanging from its wide, rubbery mouth. Holliday had seen a documentary about this kind of creature—it was a wels catfish, probably introduced by some well-meaning Russian aquaculturist as a food source years before. At thirty pounds, they were a good source of protein, but let them get into the food chain and they could live for thirty years and reach lengths of nine feet and weights of over three hundred pounds. They were cannibals, happy to eat their own kind and also the occasional fisherman or swimmer who got too close.

“Estoy limpieza de las tripas de este grande barbo repugnante ahora,”
said the old man. His sun-bleached cotton pants and ancient, laceless sneakers were covered with blood and bits of flesh and his
wifebeater undershirt was streaked like a butcher’s apron.