Paul Christopher - Valley of the Templars

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 Direccion 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.

The man in the tropical battle dress saw none of this beauty now, nor did he hear anything beyond the empty cycling hum in his headset. He reached down with his right hand and picked up the Vectronix laser range finder. He put the small device up to his eye and looked out through the stand of trees in front of him to the brightly sunlit meadow beyond. It was empty, sloping downward gently, the tall yellow rattle grass shivering in the gentle breeze. By autumn the seed pods of the grass would be mature and the field would sound as if it were home to a million rattlesnakes as the pods shook in the wind.

“Go, One,” he said softly into the microphone.

A figure rose out of the grass fifty yards ahead. He looked as if he was carrying a large foam children’s glider. Lifting the model airplane high, he took a few running steps and launched it downhill. As he did so the man with the control panel pushed a toggle switch and the almost invisible propeller behind the wings of the aircraft began to spin. The man with the portable unit picked up the handheld game controller and began to work the controls with both thumbs. The glider, with its silent electrical motor, began to climb into the sky until it was invisible. On the screen of the portable control unit, the surveillance package began sending video and data.