Paul Christopher - The Templar Legion

“It’s never quiet, is it?” Holliday said.

“Spooky,” answered Rafi, his voice edgy. “Especially when you stop and imagine what kind of things are alive all around you and how easy it would be for them to make a meal out of you if they were given half a chance. This morning I woke up and saw a centipede on the ridgepole of the tent that had to be six or seven inches long. Nasty bastards, and they bite, too.” He shook his head. “I’m just a desert kind of guy, I guess.”

“Right.” Holliday laughed. “A desert kind of guy who likes his on-campus Aroma Espresso Bar venti caramel macchiatos, stirred, with extra caramel sauce and toffee nut instead of vanilla.”

“How did you know that?” Rafi asked, looking a little affronted.

“Peg does about a five-minute skit of you ordering. It’s like something off an old episode of Frasier except in Hebrew.”

“Well, at least I don’t whine because they closed all the Starbucks outlets in Israel.”

“I could never figure that out,” said Holliday. “Starbucks is like the plague-it’s everywhere except Israel.”

“The secret power of the Viennese coffee cartel,” said Rafi.

The trail came to an end and they stepped out onto a slab of stone half the size of a city block. Directly in front of them they could see a steep, treacherous set of rapids that no one in their right mind would attempt to run.

“Not your Lost Templar’s vision of Eden,” said Holliday.

“It’s too soon to be the Kazaba Falls,” said Rafi. “We’ve got a long way to go yet.”

The frothing pool beneath the rapids turned into a misty reed-edged lake a thousand feet in diameter feeding into the low-banked river again, far below. The jungle was like an unbroken, undulating carpet of yellow and green that stretched to the horizon. Holliday took the military binoculars he’d liberated from the assault team and looked downriver. In the middle distance and close to the winding river he could just make out several thin curls of white-gray smoke rising above the jungle. It was either a riverside village or the camp of the child soldiers. The river at that point appeared to be less than two hundred feet wide. There wasn’t the slightest chance of slipping by keeping under cover of the opposite bank. He handed the glasses to Rafi.

“Maybe it’s just a downstream village,” suggested the archaeologist.

“I doubt it. That smoke is about five miles off. The kiddie soldiers are a day and a half ahead of us. They would have raided the village by now if they were still on the water and you’d be seeing a lot more smoke. If they haven’t raided the village that means they’re in the jungle somewhere between here and there.”

“So what do we do?” Peggy asked.

“Get rid of the dugouts and anything else we can’t carry,” said Holliday. “Take the tents, the dry food and the weapons. That’s about it.”

Peggy and Rafi started going through the packs while Eddie took Holliday aside.

“Those men who attacked us by the river. They had granadas , yes?”

“That’s right,” said Holliday. “Two of the men had a half dozen each.”

“I need four,” said Eddie. “And some of those plastic drinking glasses.”

“What for?”

“A welcome present for whoever our friends are back there,” he said, cocking a thumb upriver the way they’d come.

“A welcome present?”

“A farewell present, too.” Eddie grinned. “ Hola and adios .” The Cuban laughed. “The hello will be explosivo ; the good-bye will be los angeles cantando.?Lo captaste, mi amigo? ”

“Lo entiendo, amigo,” said Holliday, smiling. “I understand.”

Jean-Luc Saint-Sylvestre had no affection for mountains. If he couldn’t see the sun rise over some kind of horizon it made him nervous. He didn’t like Switzerland at all, where sunrises were in very short supply and there were mountains everywhere.

He flew out of Heathrow in the early morning, caught the eleven-thirty train from Geneva to Zurich and arrived at exactly two thirty in the afternoon. He rented a Europcar VW Passat and drove the twenty-five miles to Aarau, a town of seventeen thousand clustered around the banks of the Aar River at the foot of the Jura Mountains. It was exactly what you’d expect of a classic Swiss town.

Saint-Sylvestre had a lunch of lamb and egg noodles in the Restaurant Laterne on the Rathausgasse, then walked two blocks to number eleven, the address on the business card.

The Gesler Bank was a small, discreet gray building with small shuttered windows and an arched doorway with a brass door. There wasn’t even a plaque announcing the building’s purpose, only a carved number 11 above the door. There was, however, a state-of-the-art CCTV camera on a bracket in the doorway arch angled to cover anyone pressing the white porcelain button on one side of the doorframe. Saint-Sylvestre pushed the button, ignoring the cameras. There was a brief pause and then the brass door clicked and came slightly ajar. Saint-Sylvestre stepped inside and the door closed behind him. He found himself in a glassed-in security portal, the brass door at his back and floor-to-ceiling glass panels all around him. Through the glass he could see into a small wood-paneled lobby, the walls hung with oil paintings, all portraits. A guard in a pin-striped suit sat behind a small desk. The guard leaned forward and spoke into a microphone.

“Ihr Unternehmen wenden, Sie sich bitte,” said the voice, coming from a speaker above Saint-Sylvestre’s head.

“I’m here to see Herr Leonhard Euhler,” answered Saint-Sylvestre, speaking in French.

The man behind the table didn’t hesitate for a moment and replied in clear French with a Paris accent. “What business do you have with Herr Euhler?”

“Private business. I am here under the authority of the Moroccan government.”

“One moment,” said the guard, still speaking French. Keeping his eyes on Saint-Sylvestre in the security portal he reached down to his belt and lifted up a little speak-to-talk unit, then clicked for an answer, which Saint-Sylvestre couldn’t make out. “He’ll be right down,” said the guard.

There was a buzzing sound from within the glass booth that Saint-Sylvestre assumed came from some sort of built-in metal detector. A few moments later a narrow elevator door on the wall behind the guard opened and a slight man in his late forties or early fifties appeared.

He was medium height, and wore a dark suit, a pale blue shirt and a bright red tie. His shoes looked expensive. As he crossed the lobby Saint-Sylvester saw that he was round faced, with a high forehead, thinning hair and a thick toothbrush mustache that covered his upper lip above a wide smile. He wore stylish black plastic circular eyeglasses. He looked more like an aging, homosexual British bureaucrat than a banker. The diamond stud cuff links, the silk tie and the manicured and clear-polished nails were just a little too fey.

The security portal slipped open noiselessly and Saint-Sylvestre stepped out. “I am Dr. Euhler,” said the smiling man, extending a hand. “How may I be of service?”

Why were all German-Swiss doctors? Saint-Sylvestre wondered. He shook the extended hand. “My name is Tarik Ben Barka,” he said, speaking English and using the name that appeared on the passport a recent visitor to Kukuanaland had “lost,” and which now carried Saint-Sylvestre’s photograph. He took the sand-colored passport out of the inside pocket of his suit and extended it to Euhler, who waved it off.

“You are here on behalf of the government of Morocco?”

He could feel the man’s pale blue eyes looking him over.

“Not exactly. I am here on behalf of several clients of the Banque Populaire du Maroc.”