Paul Christopher: Valley of the Templars

Katherine Sinclair sat back in her expensive leather executive chair and smiled thinly. For the first time since arriving at the Grange, she seemed impressed.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” she said.

Dr. Eugenio Selman-Housein Sosa was desperately frightened. His blood pressure was rising into dangerous numbers, his pulse rate was at least a hundred and thirty beats per minute and his breath was coming in short, painful gasps. If he wasn’t careful he was going to go into ventricular fibrillation and drop dead on the front step of Dublin’s Shelburne Hotel.

As Cuba’s senior cardiologist, Dr. Eugenio Selman-Housein knew this was no exaggeration, and at seventy-seven years of age he was painfully aware that one incidence of VF would probably be his last.

He cursed silently. If only he’d taken the two days he needed at the Swiss conference two years ago, he would have had the cardioverter-defibrillator implanted at the Lindenhofspital in Bern and he wouldn’t be in this situation. Dear God, if only he hadn’t decided to walk back from the Trinity College campus, he wouldn’t be in this situation.

The doctor composed himself as best he could, nodded to the top-hatted doorman in the red frock coat and stepped into the front lobby and confronted the staircase that led up to reception. He forced himself to climb without relying on the old-fashioned double wooden banister and made his way up to reception. He picked up his key, climbed into one of the refurbished cage elevators and waited as the white-gloved operator took him up to the top floor.

By the time he reached his room and stepped inside, he was gasping for air. He made his way to one of the upholstered club chairs in the sitting room of his one-bedroom suite, picked up his medical bag and dropped it into his lap. He found his bottle of bisoprolol, swallowed a ten-milligram tablet of the beta blocker dry and waited for his adrenaline levels to drop. At the same time he took out his portable battery-operated blood pressure machine, fitted on the cuff and hit the START button. He sat back in the chair and closed his eyes. He was carrying around the most terrifying secret in the world and it was literally killing him.

It took the better part of an hour. When his pulse had slowed to a more tractable eighty beats per minute, he called down to the Horseshoe Bar and ordered a bottle of Pyrat Cask dark rum. When it arrived he poured three fingers of the expensive liquor into a Scotch glass and drank it slowly. He poured a second drink, then picked up the telephone. It was time. To carry the secret any longer was to invite death, and not just from ventricular fibrillation. Two bullets from El Tuerto, the One-Eyed’s famous silver-plated Type-92 Chinese semiautomatic, was just as likely. The phone rang twice and a somewhat nasal voice with a distinctly London accent answered.

“British embassy. How may I direct your call?”

William Copeland Black walked down the carpeted hallway of the principal floor of the British embassy on the Merrion Road in the Ballsbridge suburb of Dublin, home to most of the diplomatic missions in Ireland. He turned into the cultural attache’s office, a small room with two desks and a tiny window that looked out onto the low-profile embassy’s courtyard, the last place on the property you were allowed to smoke. The only other person in the office was Anabel Bonet, who had supposedly been seconded to the cultural attache’s office from Scotland Yard’s Art Theft and Forgery Squad to deal with the rash of art thefts that had been plaguing Ireland for the last few years.

The truth of it was that Anabel Bonet had never seen the inside of New Scotland Yard and anything she knew about art came from a first-year course she took at Cambridge. William Copeland Black was no cultural attache, either, and everyone who was anyone in the embassy knew it, right down to Eva Burden, the woman who answered the telephone. Both Anabel Bonet and William Black were MI6, tasked with keeping track of any potential terrorist action against the United Kingdom originating in or passing through the Republic of Ireland.

Black sat down behind his desk, pulled open the middle drawer and stared at the yellow packet of Carrol’s Sweet Afton cigarettes. He closed the drawer and looked across at Anabel. “I’ve just had the most intriguing telephone call.”

“Not here, you haven’t,” said Anabel.

“No, it came through the inquiries desk. When he gave them my name, they patched it over to my cellular while I was coming in to work.”

“After a very long lunch, I might add.”

“I went into Dubrays on Grafton Street to hear that writer.”

“Which writer?”

“Simon Toyne, the one with the funny hair. He’s rather good.”

“The phone call?”

“Right. It was from someone named Dr. Eugenio Selman-Housein Sosa. He’s staying at the Shelbourne. He wants to defect, of all things. I didn’t think anyone did that sort of thing anymore. Cold War stuff, you know?”

“Who on earth is Dr. Eugenio Selman et cetera, et cetera?”

“He’s Fidel Castro’s personal physician.”

“Bloody hell!” Anabel frowned. “What’s he doing in Dublin?”

“He’s a cardiologist. There’s a big convention at Trinity this week.”

“And he wants to defect?”

“That’s what he said.”

“Tell him to get into a cab, then.”

“He’s being watched, or so he says.”

“Do you believe him?”

“It’s possible. The Cuban DGI has a very long arm and he’s a VIP.”

“You can’t authorize this on your own.”

“I know. He’s only here until Friday. That’s three days. I’ll have to get on my trolley and visit Babylon tonight.”

“Good luck, mate.” Anabel grinned.

“I should be able to catch the diplomatic flight. No sense in traveling with the great unwashed on Ryanair or something equally disgusting.”

“No sense at all,” said Anabel somberly, then laughed.

At seven p.m. Black climbed into the waiting BAE 125 executive jet and settled back into one of the six cream-colored high-backed leather chairs in the narrow passenger section. Except for the diplomatic bag, he was the aircraft’s only passenger. He felt a little foolish, but under the circumstances time really was of the essence. If Selman-Housein was serious about his intentions, it meant that something big was up. With Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez’s bowel cancer metastasizing to his liver and his lungs, the thought of one or the other of the two elderly Castro brothers casting off this mortal coil was the kind of thing that precipitated coups and revolutions. The world was in enough trouble without the Caribbean being hit by a political hurricane.

A white-jacketed RAF steward appeared from the front section of the jet and offered him coffee and biscuits. Black accepted and the steward disappeared again. Black ate the biscuits and drank the coffee, then dimmed the light and sat in the darkness, looking out at the night. The black featureless slab of the St. George’s Channel slid by forty thousand feet below their wings. Black smiled. Once upon a time his father had told him a story about crossing the same channel on his way to finding an assassin hell-bent on murdering the king and queen.

Morris Black, his father, had taken a certain ironic pride in being the only Jew working as a detective at Scotland Yard, although he had been fully aware that he would never rise any higher in the force because of that fact. Perhaps because of that he’d become the foremost murder investigator that organization had ever seen and was called in to deal with the most difficult cases. One of those cases, which he wouldn’t ever discuss in detail until the day he died, had involved him in the intrigues of World War Two intelligence, initially landing him in the Special Operations Executive and eventually, after the war and for the rest of his life, with MI6. Somewhere early along the way, his father, already a young widower by then, had met, become involved with and eventually married his mother, Katherine Sanderson Copeland, who’d been OSS posted to England under Wild Bill Donovan during the war and a CIA officer under Hillenkoetter, Bedell-Smith, John Foster Dulles and John McCone after the war.