Paul Christopher: Red Templar

He picked up the machine gun and stood up, stepping back. Soon the entire top of the desk was alight, pages and sheets of paper carried up into the roof beams on the hot air currents, more pages whirling and twisting over to the curtains. Within less than a minute the entire room was ablaze.

Holliday went back to the hallway. He roused Eddie, stood him up, then managed to get one of the overcoats on the pegs onto him-a gray double-breasted thing with brass buttons and a fur collar. He chose another coat for himself, shrugged into it and guided Eddie toward the front door.

“Something is burning, I think,” said Eddie blearily.

“It sure is.” Holliday smiled. Holding Eddie under the arms, he managed to open the front door, where they were met by a blast of cold air. It was snowing again. “Let’s go find a ride, amigo .”

Unfortunately for Felix Fyodor Fosdikov, the sandwich he had eaten combined with the vodka and the overheated cabin of his big power grader had conspired to put him into a troubled sleep, his head tucked down to his belly, his snores rumbling like cannon fire. Had he stayed awake he would have seen the snow reach the ten-centimeter tape on the blade of his plow and would have gone off on his route. As it was he slept through the ten-centimeter mark, the twenty and the thirty before he woke up.

At first he thought his heartburn dream had become some kind of hideous nightmare in which Stalin had come back to life as a black man and was sitting beside him in the cab. Beyond the black Stalin was another man with a patch over one eye like a pirate and a very nasty-looking machine pistol.

The man with the patch over his eye said something unintelligible to the black Stalin, who appeared to be very sick and perspiring. Felix Fyodor Fosdikov was perspiring, too, and the heartburn was spreading everywhere now, turning his throat into molten lava. He fought to hold back the vomit while simultaneously clamping down on his bowels. This was no dream. The black Stalin turned to him and spoke.

“Vy znaete sposob amerikanskogo poso’stva?”

“Konechno.” Felix Fyodor nodded. Under the circumstances, telling the truth seemed like the best option. Out of the corner of his eye he could see a fiery glow somewhere behind the high fence that surrounded the dacha. Bad things were happening tonight. His heartburn cranked up another notch.

“He knows,” said Eddie, turning to Holliday, crammed in beside him in the small, overheated cab.

“Then tell him to go there now,” Holliday said, gesturing with his weapon.

“Tuda, v nastoyashchyee vremya,” translated Eddie.

Felix Fyodor didn’t need to be told twice.

“Da,” he said, and threw the big power grader into one of its many forward gears. The tall, insectlike machine lurched forward into the snowy night. Behind it, in the birch woods beyond the fence, the dacha burned and the first sirens could be heard.

The first alarm from the Kremlin had gone out at two fifteen after a forty-minute discussion between members of the special Kremlin Spetsnaz unit about the loss of face that would occur if they asked for help. But help was clearly needed, and the first calls were broadcast. The first went out to the Moscow Metropolitan Police, who, recognizing a political hot potato when they saw one, immediately passed responsibility over to the FSB. The FSB, in the way of all large bureaucracies, spent a great deal of time calling people and playing pass-the-buck for a full ninety minutes. It wasn’t until three thirty that a request was made to the army for several of its attack helicopters, which then joined the four Kremlin Spetsnaz choppers, all of which spent a further forty-five minutes coordinating their approach and attack on the dacha in Kuntsevo. A unit of special Kremlin guards was dispatched along the subway line, and a further forty local police vehicles were also roped into the party. When a fire was reported on the old abandoned estate, four local fire stations sent their various vehicles to Kuntsevo as well. At four ten in the morning the first FSB unit arrived at the scene, almost half an hour after Felix Fyodor and his passengers had joined the ubiquitous scores of snowplows and graders out on the Moscow streets and highways. Any trace of the power grader’s presence at the Kuntsevo property was long since covered by the freshly fallen snow. At four thirty-five Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, Dmitry Anatolyevich Medvedev, the patriarch of Moscow, and Vasilyevich Bortnikov, head of the FSB, had all been individually woken from their beds and advised of the situation. Putin, standing by the phone in his silk dressing gown, summed it up succinctly for the others.

“Ebanatyi pidaraz!”

“Vladimir!” said his wife, Lyudmila. “Such language!”

It was two hours earlier by Vatican time when Cardinal Spada’s sleep was interrupted by a knock on the bedroom door of his lavish apartment. The Vatican secretary of state came fully awake to the smell of freshly brewed espresso. He rolled over and saw the bland face of his servant, Brother Timothy, a smart, extremely pretty and well-connected young man who hoped for better things through his attachment to the great Cardinal Spada.

Spada took a sip of the scalding coffee, then set it down on the night table beside the enormous four-poster bed that was said to have belonged to one of the Borgias. He pulled himself up against the scrolled headboard while Timothy adjusted his pillows. The young man offered Spada his wire-rimmed spectacles, and the cardinal slipped them on.

“Presumably there is good reason to interrupt my sleep, Timothy. The pope isn’t dead, is he?”

“No, Your Eminence, it’s Father Brennan.”

“ That old bugger’s dead?” Spada said hopefully.

“No, Your Eminence, he’s outside, and he’d like to speak to you on a matter of some urgency.”

Spada gave a heartfelt sigh and picked up his coffee from the bedside table. “I suppose you’d better send him in.”

“Yes, Your Eminence.” The monk shimmered away, closing the door behind him. Spada sipped his coffee.

The Irish priest who was also the head of Spada’s intelligence network appeared a few seconds later dressed in a rumpled suit with a stained clerical collar and smoking what was probably his tenth cigarette of the day. He didn’t beat around the bush.

“They’ve found bloody Pesek with a bullet in his eye stuffed into a refrigerator in an apartment off the Arbat. The apartment was rented by a Russian Orthodox priest named Ivanov who was somehow connected to Genrikhovich.”

“Dear me,” said Spada.

“There’re also several unconfirmed reports of some sort of attack on the Kremlin. Bodies and such.”

“Holliday and his friend?”

“Yes.”

“The book?”

“No.”

“Porca troia!” Spada said, reminding himself almost instantly to say ten Our Fathers and twenty Hail Marys for his use of foul language.

At roughly the same time Cardinal Spada was uttering blasphemous oaths in Rome, Pat Philpot, national counterterrorism liaison at the Moscow embassy, was sitting at his desk in the secure cube, with Whit Havers standing on the other side of it. Pat Philpot, inevitably known by friends and enemies alike as Potsy, was not a happy man. He liked his sleep, for one thing, and his banishment to the Moscow boonies after the catastrophe of eighteen months before at least had the benefit that he could basically do nothing through his working days and still collect a salary. It also took him eight thousand miles away from his nagging ex-wife and his children, who were always asking him for money. Four thirty in the morning was not his idea of a good start to the day. He was also hungry, which was why he was now working his way steadily through four McDonald’s Big Breakfasts from the Red Square outlet. Some people would have said Philpot had an eating disorder; Pat would have told you he was a big man who wanted to get bigger. Brinsley Whitman Havers, who hadn’t had so much as a roti in fifteen years, was simply disgusted.