Paul Christopher - The Templar Legion

“It’s Latin and French, side by side,” he said. “What is it?”

“I call it the Templar Codex,” said Rafi. “From what I can tell Roche-Guillaume translated al-Rahman’s description of finding the mines and the eventual trip back to civilization.” The archaeologist pointed to a tiny illustration. As small as it was it was instantly recognizable-a Viking ship in flames, empty except for a funeral pyre and a body. “At a guess I’d say this relates to the death of our friend Ragnar Skull Splitter.” Rafi paused, clearly moved as he stared down at the seven-hundred-year old manuscript. “As I said, Roche-Guillaume was a historian. He wanted his own and al-Rahman’s stories to survive; and they did.”

“People would pay millions for this, wouldn’t they?” Peggy said.

“Easily.” Rafi nodded. “The manuscript is priceless, let alone what it reveals.”

Holliday looked up from the pages and shook his head. “No, much more than just that. People would kill for this book.”

“It belongs in a museum; the question is, How do I get it there?” Rafi said.

“What’s the border situation?”

“It varies. Kenya, the guards are all stoned on Khat and it could go either way; Eritrea is men with guns. Sudan, sometimes it’s a bunch of goats; sometimes it’s a full-scale military crossing. Somalia-don’t even think about it.”

“Too risky to smuggle it out, then.”

“So what do we do?” Peggy asked.

“I want to at least get a photographic record of it,” said Rafi.

“That’s easy enough,” said Peggy, lifting the big Nikon. “But what do we do after that?”

“Put it back where we found it for the time being,” said Rafi. “Show the pictures to some museums, see if I can get one of them to back a proper expedition.”

“Where’s the nearest border crossing into the Sudan?”

“Metemma,” said Rafi. “Then Al Qadarif and Khartoum.”

“Then that’s how we go,” said Holliday. “Photograph the codex and everything else, put it all onto a memory stick and change the chip in your camera. If some nosey parker wants to see your vacation snaps, we’ll show him a lot of goats and smiling kids. I’ll carry the memory stick and the chip, Peggy plays photographer and we keep Rafi innocent as a lamb.”

“That’ll be the day.” Peggy snorted. “Considering who got us into this mess.”

“Sorry,” said Rafi. “I didn’t really think; I just wanted both of you to see this place and the codex.”

“Spilt milk and all that,” said Holliday briskly. “Let’s get the pictures taken and then let’s get the hell out of here.”

Out of the corner of his eye Holliday thought he saw a movement in the jungle at the edge of the clearing. He turned quickly and stared out the open doorway of the mausoleum. He kept his eyes fixed on the edge of the clearing and waited. Nothing moved.

“What’s that all about?” Peggy asked, looking at her cousin carefully. She knew that look. He was on high alert.

“Nothing,” said Holliday slowly. “Just a little spooked, I guess.”

6

Archibald “Archie” Ives had been an old Africa hand for most of his adult life. The son of a Welsh coal miner, with a second-rate degree in geology from a third-rate college, Ives paid his dues as a prospector and assayer in British Columbia and Nevada, but his first job in Sierra Leone for a Canadian fly-by-night diamond exploration company was a perfect fit. He didn’t find any diamonds but it felt like coming home.

For the next thirty-five years he’d roamed around Africa, sometimes working for himself and sometimes working for corporate interests, big and small. He’d gone from rags to relative riches a half dozen times, but what he really liked doing was tramping around in the desert or the jungle, looking for the next big strike and not really caring much whether he found it or not. He lived for the hunt. He hadn’t been back to England in a dozen years, and he had no intention of doing so. His recent job for Matheson had come through their office in Bamako, Mali.

Ives had never worked for Matheson before, but he’d heard stories about the company’s questionable business tactics. Still, stories were just stories, and the money they were offering was real. In fact, it was too real, and it was too much , which raised all sorts of alarms in Ives’s head. All of which he ignored. Beggars couldn’t be choosers and there was no question of his beggarly status at the time the offer was made; in fact, he had less than a hundred Mali francs in his pocket and a longoverdue hotel and bar bill at the Kempinski El Farouk. He’d taken the money and he’d done the job and, according to Major Allen Faulkener, the Rifles (retired), he had also earned a bonus that would put him on easy street for the rest of his life. He was supposed to meet with Faulkener in Khartoum, sign a nondisclosure, hand over his paperwork and get his bonus. Easy as pie.

Except Archie Ives didn’t believe a word of it.

He drove the Land Rover along the flat, featureless Al Qadarif-Khartoum highway, the air-conditioning on full blast. There was nothing but desert on either side of him, and the black road ahead. He hadn’t seen another vehicle for two hours. The sun beat down on everything like a great hot hammer. Nothing moved except the Land Rover. Anything in the desert in this heat was well on its way to being dead.

Ives lit a cigarette. The site he’d discovered in the jungle outback of Kukuanaland was worth billions. The fact that the site even existed was itself a priceless piece of information, of course, and at the same time dangerous. Was Faulkener simply going to give him his bonus and then let him walk away? It was doubtful. According to the scuttlebutt, Faulkener was no more a member of the Rifles than Archie was. The SAS was more likely, or maybe even MI6. In the rarefied atmosphere where people like that did their business, the Archie Iveses of the world were nothing but loose ends, a note in a file folder with the word “terminated” stamped across his photograph. Like a spot of gravy on a club tie, Archie was something to be wiped away and forgotten.

The smart money said he should drive on past Khartoum and follow the Pan African all the way to Cairo. But that wasn’t really smart at all. He was a prospector, and prospecting was all he knew. Bloody Africa was all he knew. He could hide out for a while, but eventually his money would run out and he’d have to look for work. Bells would ring when he showed up in a mining office anywhere on the continent, and Faulkener and his people would be on him like dingleberries on a camel’s arse.

Ives dragged on the cigarette. He was boxed in and he knew it. He needed Faulkener’s bonus and getting it would probably be his death warrant. He crushed out the cigarette in the ashtray and blew a cloud of smoke at the windshield. A sign ticked by. Two hundred kilometers to Khartoum. He still had time to figure something out. Something to save his life.

The border crossing at Gallabat was of the herd-of-goats variety. Holliday watched as a bored Sudanese customs official in a round hut with a thatched roof checked their papers, held out his hand for a bribe as though it were the most normal thing in the world and looked longingly at Rafi’s Rolex. Rafi studiously avoided the look and gave the man a hundred Ethiopian birr-a little over ten dollars-which seemed to do the trick. The customs man was armed with a Type 56 assault rifle, the Chinese knockoff of the Russian AK-47. Holliday thought that kind of hardware was a little extreme for a border crossing populated by more goats than people, but then again, for a country that had been at war in some form or another since Muhammad Ahmad bin Abd Allah came out of the desert in 1881 claiming to be the Mahdi, the Second Coming, carrying weapons in the Sudan was probably second nature.