Valley of the Templars (11 page)

He glanced at Holliday, his eyes squinting upward. “I catch at the river mouth this morning, when I am coming in from the sea,” he said in English. His voice was as rough as his cigar and his mouth was missing a few teeth here and there. He turned to Eddie.
“Su amigo pirata hablaba nada de español?”

“His pirate friend speaks enough Spanish to get by,” said Holliday.

“Then we get along okay,” said the old man, and spit into the water again. As he gutted the fish he tossed the already flyblown trails of slimy offal into the water and then began cutting the giant fish into large fist-sized pieces and throwing them into a pair of old foam coolers beside him. “
Cebo,
” he grunted. “Bait.” He nodded toward the boat clewed to the wharf a few yards behind him.

The boat looked almost as old as Arango. Once upon a time the hull had been white with a light blue superstructure, but sometime in its life it had been painted deep blue fading up to gray. On the horizon she would disappear against the sea and the sky, and Holliday had a fairly good idea why.

She was filthy, paint peeling everywhere. The stem was battered with its varnish worn off down to the bare wood from decades of turbulent passages, and the canvas sunshade on the flybridge above the cabin
was gray and torn. To Holliday’s eye she looked to be about thirty-five or forty feet long and lay squat in the water as though she was bottom heavy. For a wooden boat of that weight, it was odd that the whole side of the hull for two feet above the waterline was so beaten up and scratched. That kind of wear and tear usually meant the boat was used to traveling at brutally high speeds. The name on her transom was in red picked out in black:

TIBURON BLANCO

Even his basic Spanish was good enough to translate that:
White Shark.

Arango sucked on his cigar, gave Eddie a look and picked up the first of the foam containers, the sinews on his wiry sun-blackened arms leaping out like stretched cables. He hauled the cooler back to the boat and heaved it over the gunwale and into the cockpit at the stern. Taking the hint, Eddie picked up the second bait box and followed suit.

The old man straightened, arching his back. He took a long puff on the cigar, the pull making a dry, crackling sound. He looked up at the sky and blew the smoke upward. Lady Gaga had been replaced by Pittbull doing “Ay Chico.” Arango looked down at Eddie again. He hawked and this time the blob of nicotine-colored phlegm landed within an inch of Eddie’s feet.

“
Qué quieres, cabron?
What you want with a poor old man like me?”

Eddie took out a Romeo y Julieta Short Churchill he’d purchased at the hotel tobacconist’s and lit it with his old Zippo.

“Because I want your boat,
cabron
—
quiero alquilar su barco maldito, maldito el hombre de cerdo
.”

“How much you pay me? Dollars.”

“How much do you want?” Holliday asked.

“Two hundred a day.”

“Fine.”

“Three hundred?”

“A hundred and fifty,” answered Holliday.

“No, no, two hundred,” said Arango hastily.

“Sí,”
said Eddie.

“Plus diesel.”

“Sí.”

“And food.”

“Sí.”

“Ron.”

“One bottle a day.”

“Cerveza, así.”

“Fijado.”

“And cigars like those?” Arango said, pointing a bony finger at the Short Churchill Eddie had just fired up.

Eddie grinned, turned to Holliday and winked again. He turned back to Arango and handed him
the already lit cigar. The old man carefully took the juicy stub of the cigar from his mouth, stuck a fat tongue on the end to make sure it was dead and stuck the thing behind his ear. He put the Churchill into his mouth, chewed happily and wiped his hand on his undershirt before extending it to Holliday. A little apprehensively Holliday shook the man’s hand, surprised at its strength.

“We got a deal, American. You drive a hard bargain.”

“
Vete a la mierda, viejo.
Let’s get aboard.”

Oak Lawn Farm is a two-hundred-acre secluded estate at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains near Covesville, Virginia, and about a two-hour drive south of Washington, D.C. The home sits on a gentle knoll, surrounded by elegant hardwoods and ancient boxwoods overlooking pastoral and mountain views in every direction. The main house was constructed in 1780 and added onto throughout the 1800s. It has four bedrooms, two full bathrooms, a powder room, five working fireplaces, a country kitchen, an upstairs sun porch and greenhouse, a wraparound porch and a pergola on the main floor, a three-bedroom guest cottage and a smaller two-bedroom studio. The whole thing had been picked up by the CIA for $3.2 million. At most it is used three times a
year, usually for high-level management conferences with allied agencies and the occasional off-the-books Fourth of July picnic or barbecue.

William Black sat on the wooden bench under the two-hundred-year-old oak tree that had given the estate its name, and smoked a cigarette. He remembered his father telling him about the old OSS training school he’d gone to just before the Americans fell pell-mell into World War Two. He was with some woman other than his mother then, and not for the first time Will Black found himself thinking about the fact that children never really knew their parents, nor the parents their children. It was one of those timeless conundrums, like why is there war.

He’d been in the States for five days now, all of them spent with dear Dr. Eugenio Selman-Housein here at Oak Lawn. So far there hadn’t been any time to see his son, Gabriel, or even spend an hour with him at the school. Selman-Housein had to be encouraged for taking every small step closer to revealing what he knew, like an infant child being potty-trained. Not only was the task frustrating and time-consuming, but it was also boring.

The MI6 officer sighed. Maybe Dick Cheney, bless his evil, black heart, had the best idea—pour water down the irritating bastard’s throat until he coughed up what you wanted him to tell you.

So far the skittish and extremely irritating little
Cuban had told Black, Kingman and the Pilkington girl they’d been lumbered with very little. According to Selman-Housein, Fidel was on his deathbed, but Castro had been on his deathbed ever since Juan Orta, a corrupt government official who often had lunch with El Comandante and his cronies, tried on six occasions to poison the Bearded One’s favorite midday meal, his
perrito caliente
—hot dogs. Black shook his head—hot dogs! The useless twaddle you learned working for MI6. Military intelligence indeed. Spying reduced to bureaucratic folderol and nitpicking.

Black heard footsteps behind him and turned, expecting to see Kingman. It was Pilkington.

“Oh,” she said. “I didn’t see you there. I came out for a smoke, as well.”

“Feel free,” said Black, shifting down the bench. The young woman took out a package of Marlboros and shook one out. Black lit it with his father’s old World War One Imco foxhole lighter.

She took a deep lungful of smoke and then blew it out gratefully. “Very politically incorrect of me, I know,” she said. “Drinking makes me dizzy, smoking pot is kind of boring after a while and I get sleepy reading Nicholas Sparks. I have no other vices.”

“What about sex?” Black asked pleasantly.

“I thought the Brits didn’t have sex,” she said.

“Only members of the royal family,” answered
Black. “Answer the question; I’m a professional interrogator. I’ll wheedle it out of you eventually.”

“To be honest,” said the Pilkington girl, “I can’t remember.”

“First rule of interrogation—when a person begins a sentence with the phrase ‘to be honest,’ it’s odds on she’s lying.”

The Pilkington girl gave him a long look, took another drag on her cigarette and let it spin out of her nostrils. “He’s stalling,” she said finally, changing the subject abruptly.

“Pardon?”

“Selman-Housein. He’s stalling.”

“Why?”

“He’s no dummy. He’s been Castro’s doctor since the first stroke in 1989. You manage to stay on Fidel’s A team for twenty years, you’ve got to know how to shuck and jive if you want to survive. Know too many of
El Comandante
’s secrets and you usually wind up in a car accident, a plane crash or having a massive heart attack for no good reason. Get
real
close like Che did and you wind up with the boss sending you on a hopeless mission to Bolivia and then siccing the CIA on you.”

“You know your history,” said Black.

The pretty young woman shrugged. “I read a lot and I do my homework.”

“So, why did he defect?”

“I don’t think he did,” she said quietly.

“Then what’s he doing in a Virginia farmhouse eating chicken pot pie and apple brown Betty or whatever it is you Americans call bread pudding?”

“I think he’s a messenger.”

“I don’t understand,” said Black.

“Think about it. The good doctor goes to conferences all over the world, all the time. Why now and why Ireland of all places? He was in Montreal a month and a half ago—it would have been a lot easier for him to defect from Canada, but he didn’t.”

“All right, why now and why Ireland?”

“The Dirección de Inteligencia has one of the best foreign intelligence operations in the world. They know who the CIA chiefs of station and the MI controllers are for each and every U.S. embassy and British embassy, as well. I think he defected in Ireland because of you, Mr. Black.”

“Why on earth would he do a thing like that?”

“Because I think it’s true. The DI in Havana probably has a file on you six inches thick. They know your mother was American, they know you have a special relationship with the agency and they knew if the doctor defected in Dublin you’d almost certainly rendition him to us, but he’d have MI6 as the middleman and he wouldn’t be ‘disappeared’ to some black site in Lithuania, pardon the pun.”

“You really have done your homework,” said
Black, impressed. “But it’s all a bit fanciful, don’t you think?”

“Not really,” she said. She finished her cigarette and stubbed it out in the small glass ashtray between them on the bench. She took out another Marlboro and Black lit it for her.

“Go on,” he said.

“Well, we knew that Holliday and Cabrera left Toronto for Havana—we have them on surveillance video from Pearson International. Backtracking from there, I found out they’d been staying at the Park Hyatt in downtown Toronto. Holliday made one telephone call of consequence while he was there setting up an appointment with a man named Steven Braintree, a professor of medeival studies at the University of Toronto. Braintree’s office is a hundred yards from the Park Hyatt, by the way.”

“Fascinating,” said Black. “But hardly relevant.”

“I’ll get to that,” said the Pilkington woman. “At any rate, Braintree is an expat American who came up to Canada as a matter of conscience during the first Bush war in Iraq. I reminded Professor Braintree that despite now paying Canadian income tax he still has to file U.S. income tax each and every year, which of course he hadn’t been doing. I then asked him what he and Holliday had discussed during their meeting.”

“Do tell,” urged Black.

“Apparently there was a secret offshoot of the
Templars in Cuba dating back to the sixteenth century called La Hermandad dos Cavaleiros de Cristo. The Brotherhood of the Knights of Christ, most often shortened to simply La Hermandad, the Brotherhood.”

“Once again, fascinating but hardly relevant.”

“There have been persistent rumors that La Hermandad still exists. A secret cabal of ten families that have been the real power in Cuba for five hundred years.”

“Persistent rumors,” murmured Black. “Not hard evidence.”

“Apparently the lineage of this cabal is matriarchal. One of the families is named Ruz, Castro’s mother’s maiden name. Another is Rodriguez, as in General Eduardo Delgado Rodriguez, head of Cuban intelligence. Do you known Selman-Housein’s full name?”

“Enlighten me.”

“Selman-Housein Sosa. Inside El Templete, a Templar chapel in Havana that is officially used only once a year, there is a painting by French painter Jean Baptiste Vermay showing the first town meeting held in Havana. First and foremost in the painting is a man in knight’s armor, a conquistador named Juan Ortega
Sosa
.

“Fidel Castro Ruz, General Eduardo Delgado Rodriguez and Selman-Housein Sosa—all members of
La Hermandad. It has to mean something. We just don’t have enough letters.”

“Letters?” Black asked, confused.

“As in a crossword puzzle. We find the missing letters to fill in the blank squares and we’ll have our answer.”

“You really are an impressive woman, Miss Pilkington.” Black smiled.

“Call me Carrie.”

“Like the Stephen King story?”

“That’s me.” She stubbed out her cigarette and stood up. “Shall we go back and start waterboarding the doctor so we can fill in the blanks?”

“My thoughts exactly,” said Black, standing as well. “But alas, that world has gone the way of the dodo.”

“Darn,” said Carrie.

The man in the tropical camouflage battle dress adjusted his headset and stared at the portable control-panel-in-a-suitcase on the ground in front of him. He was surrounded by banks of ferns and undergrowth, the shadows of the tall pines and eucalyptus trees turning the rain forest floor into a complex pattern of contrasting light and shadow that swallowed up the man in battle dress and made him close to invisible.

The air was full of the soft, gentle scent of butterfly lilies and the sweeter odors of jasmine and ginger mixed with the rot smell of overripe bananas and plantains that had fallen from the trees above to lie on the dark, rich earth below. Everywhere around the man the elegant song of the
tocororo
could be heard and the harsher telegraphing of the ivory-billed woodpecker.

Before he’d slipped the headset on, the man had even heard the furious whisper of hummingbird wings nearby and the twittering of the tiny green and
red
cartacuba
. This was the Topes de Collantes, the highest point in the Sierra del Escambray, a mountain twenty-six hundred feet above sea level, its flanks covered in a smothering blanket of almost impenetrable jungle foliage. What few roads existed were unpaved and dangerous for anything but high-wheeled military vehicles and sturdy four-by-fours. This place had come close to defeating Fidel more than fifty years ago, and it was no place for casual visitors now.