Paul Christopher - Valley of the Templars

“The way we’re hearing it, Raul’s son Alejandro will be top dog, at least as long as he can fight off the competition.” He grinned. “It’s going to be the biggest fire sale since they brought down the Berlin wall.”

Kingman paused, took another big bite of his cheeseburger and washed it down with more wine. “Setting the doctor loose was a red flag, Mr. Patchin. Get your bets down and get them down early. If I was you, boy, I’d start selling sugar futures short and tobacco futures high. The only thing in the way of it now is this guy Holliday and your two employees.” He paused, gesturing toward Patchin’s plate. “Eat up your burger, boy. That thing would cost you fifty bucks at any decent restaurant inside the Beltway and you’re going to need a full stomach by the time we get there.”

“Get where, exactly?”

“Geneva. Talks with Mrs. Kate Sinclair, our own big jefe. And you got a lot of ’splainin’ to do, my friend; the old bitch is not at all happy with the way this is all going down.”

Holliday heard the deep, resonant buzzing before he saw anything. A sound like the humming of an industrious swarm of bees around a hive. But it wasn’t bees and it wasn’t a hive. He was on Eddie’s heels within a few moments of his friend leaving his brother, but it had taken him more than an hour of fighting his way through the jungle to catch up with him.

Throughout the chase he’d expected to hear bursts of gunfire, but there was nothing but the raucous sounds of the birds in the trees and the faint, distant thunder of what seemed like a summer storm approaching.

The scene he came upon abruptly in the small clearing was like something out of Lord of the Flies . The three men were arranged in a triangle, their headless naked bodies impaled upside down on long bamboo stakes pounded into the ground, the sawn-off heads thrust onto the tops of the poles, eyelids slashed off, dead eyes covered with crawling flies.

Their tongues and genitals had also been hacked off and rested together at the base of each pole. All three of the men’s bellies had been slashed open, the bloody purple coils of intestine cascading onto the ground. Kneeling in the middle of the triangle, stripped to the waist, his face covered in streaks of blood, was Eddie, chanting softly but clearly, his hands, also bloody, held outstretched and palms up. His eyes were closed and his head was tilted back as the flies swarmed all around him and his terrible trophies.

Ochosi Ode mata oba akofa aye o unso ire o wa mi Ochosi omode ache.

Ochosi Ode mata oba akofa aye o unso ire o wa mi Ochosi omode ache.

Ochosi Ode mata oba akofa aye o unso ire o wa mi Ochosi omode ache.

He kept repeating the long phrase a dozen more times and then stood. His head came forward and his eyes opened, looking at the three dead men around him. Then he noticed Holliday standing silently at the edge of the clearing and came toward him.

“I was saying a prayer to Ochosi , the Orisha of Justice, the justice which these men have been given. They killed my brother and the pilot, Pete, the way you would kill an animal. There is no honor in that, so they died without honor themselves, and animals can eat them where they stand. Let the flies use them as nests for their maggots, for that is all they are worth.” He turned back to the grim assembly of dead flesh behind him. “There were four of them, but one escaped. His time will come, though, companero , I promise it.”

“These men died hard,” said Holliday, his voice soft.

“Does it offend you?” Eddie asked.

“No, your brother died hard, as well, but at least he died with great honor. He was trying to save Pete’s life.”

“Thank you,” said Eddie. He looked at the dead men and spit in their direction, then turned back to Holliday. “Sometimes the old ways are the best ways.”

Holliday had no answer for that. He put out his hand and touched Eddie’s bare shoulder. “Time to leave here, amigo, and get back to the others. What your brother said before he died makes it even more important that we get away from here.” His brother’s secret was America’s worst nightmare, the code above all codes that would send a shiver up the spine of any military figure or president who heard it, no matter how battle-hardened that military figure was or how stalwart and valiant the president: PINNACLE-NUCFLASH. The detonation or possible detonation of a nuclear weapon that creates the risk of an outbreak of nuclear war.

The man moved slowly through the deep mangroves of the Everglades, guiding the lightweight fiberglass kayak through the dark green tunnels of foliage. A mile or so behind him, his partner was waiting patiently on the airboat, ready to whisk them both back to civilization.

When the man reached the optimum distance according to his GPS unit, he backwatered with his double-bladed paddle and stopped. Reaching down between his legs, he hauled out the sixty-pound rucksack containing the RA-115-01 submersible device and dropped it over the side. The device could last for years underwater, so the man had no fear for its safety. With the bundle safely out of sight, he backpedaled out of the mangrove tunnel and headed back to the airboat.

“As Benjamin Disraeli, the British prime minister, once said a long time ago, ‘The world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes.’ How true it is,” sighed J. Hunter Kokum, the sixty-three-year-old national security adviser to the president, magically elevated to that position after the untimely retirement of the previous adviser, General George Armstrong Temple, for “reasons of health,” a common White House ailment that seemed to bring down so many great men. Perhaps, Kokum thought, smiling, it was some kind of power flu that only people in high positions caught.

Behind Kokum’s back in the hallowed halls of the White House West Wing, Kokum was often called the Gray Ghost. His hair was gray, his suit was gray and his face was gray. He even wore a gray silk tie and had a gray silk puff in the breast pocket of his jacket. He wore gray eel-skin Romano loafers and carried a Geoffrey Beene stingray-skin billfold, also gray. This led to his other nickname, Reptile Man, which he rather favored for its superhero overtones.

Kokum left his office, turned right and trotted up the short flight of steps. He passed the closed door of the vice president’s Ceremonial Office-rarely used-passed the closed door of the vice president’s secretary-rarely there-and turned into Harley McGraw’s office, the president’s chief of staff.

Unlike Kokum’s tornado-struck office, McGraw’s office was as neat as a pin, and so was McGraw. He was the same age as Kokum but much more robust. He had a wide face, a three-quarters bald head and the broad nose of a sixth-generation Mick from Chicago, which is exactly what he was.

His grandfather had been a cop, his father had been a cop and, not one to be typecast, Harley McGraw became a banker, and a good one. By the time he was thirty he was a millionaire, by the time he was forty he was the whispering wizard giving the mayor a direction to go in and by the time he was sixty he was another kind of wizard, whispering into the ear of a presidential candidate.

The whispers must have been the right ones, because his candidate won and he was made secretary of commerce for his efforts. During the wholesale slaughter of the West Wing staff after what had become known as the Kremlin Khristmas and with the elections looming, the president, like every other president before him, wanted Chicago in his pocket, so Harley McGraw was made chief of staff.

“So,” said Kokum, sitting down across the wide desk from McGraw. “Who would have figured it? Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.”