Paul Christopher - Valley of the Templars

“No,” said Eddie. “I don’t think he is hiding; to hide, all you have to do is lose yourself in the favelas of Havana. There are places in those slums and baracoas even the Secret Police will not go. I think perhaps he knows something, maybe too much. I think perhaps he has gone there to find something.”

“So, how do we get there?”

“To go by the motorcycle or even a rented car would attract too much attention.”

“We’re tourists. We can go anywhere.”

“This is Cuba, mi colonel. You cannot go anywhere without a reason, even a tourist. And this is not a place where tourists go.” For a moment Eddie’s eyes settled on the tourists and prostitutes lingering by the sea wall. Then his focus shifted farther out.

“By sea,” said Eddie finally. “We must find a boat.”

“One of my people in Cardinal Ortega’s office in Havana has been in contact,” said Father Thomas Brennan, head of Soladitum Pianum, the Vatican Secret Service. Brennan was in the office of his master, Cardinal secretary of state Antonio Niccolo Spada. The cardinal, every day of his seventy-nine years etched into the lines on his face and every glass of Bardolino he’d ever sipped visible in the blown veins of his hooked and shiny nose, looked up at the disheveled Irish priest and frowned.

“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 Operacion 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.