Paul Christopher: Red Templar

There was a long pause. Potsy swallowed what was left of the caramel candy and cleared his throat. He stared at the man seated across from him. He’d known Holliday for the better part of thirty years. Twice he’d saved his life. If nothing else Potsy was a good judge of character; he knew that regardless of any past relationship, the one-eyed man would be true to his word. And he knew more than where the bodies were buried-he knew who’d dug the graves. Finally he spoke.

“I’ll see what I can do.”

Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport is enormous; the passenger terminal is the size of a dozen football fields, and although it has been given a rudimentary face-lift since the fall of the Soviet Union, it still has the low-ceilinged, brightly lit, concrete-columned and utilitarian look that was dominant in that era, although the bare concrete columns had now been plastered with liquor company advertisements. On an average afternoon in early November there can be up to fifty thousand people milling around in the enormous space, some arriving, some departing. After several Chechen terrorist attacks the security presence has been increased, and heavily armed police are a common sight. There are hundreds of cameras, and metal detectors have been installed in all the entrance doorways.

Holliday and Eddie arrived at the airport at three fifteen in the afternoon, each of them handcuffed to a U.S. Marine guard from the embassy and flanked by two black-uniformed and helmeted “special” officers. An unmarked U.S. Army VIP Gulfstream V had been arranged to take them to Ramstein Air Force Base, with a flight time of two and a half hours. Both Holliday and Eddie had already been cleared by Russian customs and immigration by special arrangement with Prime Minister Putin’s office in the Kremlin.

John Bone, seated on a plastic bench with his overcoat over his arm, saw the man first. He looked either extremely ill or worse, drunk, and his weaponry was wrong. He wasn’t carrying the standard Czech-made Skorpion submachine gun. His handgun looked like a twenty-year-old Makarov rather than the proper Stechkin APS blowback pistol. On top of that the man’s uniform was dirty and ill fitting, hanging on him like a clown’s outfit. John Bone was a man of many talents, and one of them was knowing when the kill site had been prejudiced. He stood up, walking crosswise across the terminal and out of harm’s way. Maybe some other time.

As Holliday and Eddie headed for the special boarding gate that had been arranged, a uniformed security policeman came out of the crowd almost directly in front of them. His name was Yakov Semenov, and the uniform, weapons and identification allowing him entrance to the airport had been provided by his boss, Yevgeni Ivanovich Barsukov, imprisoned head of the Tambov Gang of St. Petersburg, the assignment done at the request of Pierre Ducos and the other Apostles. Semenov, suffering from metastasized fourth-stage lung cancer, knew there was very little likelihood that he would survive the next thirty seconds-he had been promised that his family in St. Petersburg would be amply rewarded for his sacrifice.

Eddie was the first to see Semenov draw his weapon and he acted instinctively; yanking his marine guard bodily to the right he shouldered Holliday out of the line of fire. He was too late; the assassin had already fired. Falling, Holliday saw rather than felt an enormous white-hot blur of pain in the corner of his right eye, and then there was nothing but the perfect certain blackness of death.

The eyewitness statements provided by the two marine escorts agreed that the assassin was definitely aiming for center mass when he fired. If it hadn’t been for Eddie’s quick thinking there was no doubt that had the homemade dumdum round connected it would have blown Holliday’s heart out through his spinal cord. As it was the shot struck Holliday in the empty socket of his right eye, exiting the skull two inches above his ear.

It was decided that the surgeons at the trauma center at Ramstein AFB could do a better job, and he arrived there two hours later. The surgeons put him into an induced coma for three days until his brain swelling subsided, and then he was awakened, not much the worse for wear but suffering from the mother of all concussions and the grandmother of all headaches.

Holliday woke from his first good night’s sleep since arriving at Ramstein and opened his eyes. Eddie, sitting in the big visitor’s chair by the window, looked up.

“You are awake, compadre . You still have the headache?”

“It’s starting to fade.”

Eddie brought the rolling table and pushed it so it was across Holliday’s lap. Holliday used the control on the bed and raised it into a sitting position, and Eddie brought him his breakfast tray. He sat down at the edge of the bed.

Holliday looked at his friend; something was clearly bothering him. “What’s the matter?”

Eddie sighed. “I spoke with my mother in Habana last night. My brother Domingo, who works for the Ministry of the Interior, has vanished, disappeared. She is very worried. . how do you say it in English. . frantic?”

Holliday could see from his expression that Eddie wasn’t too far from being frantic himself. He thought about Eddie and what they had been through, both in Africa and in Russia. Holliday had never had a brother and rarely a close friend, but he had one now, and the kind of friendship he and Eddie had together had obligations and responsibilities.

“Okay,” said Holliday quietly. “As soon as they let me out of here let’s go find him.”