Paul Christopher - The Templar Legion

“Peggy!” Rafi bellowed, running toward her. Holliday made a running tackle, bowling Rafi out of harm’s way just as the elephant-nosed fish Eddie had been carrying flew through the air and struck the creature heavily on the side of the head. Stunned for a second she came to a lurching halt, looking around, roaring insanely.

“?Hola!?El cerdo grande, cago en tu leche el gordota!?Por aqui!”

The huge creature spotted Eddie, turned to him on her spindly legs and pawed the ground with her razor hooves. Eddie pointed the heavy spear toward the sow and made a lunging motion. The sow attacked, head high. Eddie waited until the last second, dropped to one knee, then pounded the blunt end of the spear into the ground at no more than a twenty-degree angle. He gripped the spear with both arms and tensed as the sow sprang forward, the end of the spear going under her raised snout and into the soft tissue of her chest. Eddie was bowled over onto his back but he managed to hang on to the spear. Squealing, the huge beast thrust herself toward Eddie, forcing her body down the pole, impaling herself even more horribly as she tried to bring her gnashing teeth to bear. She died, snorting and groaning weakly a few moments later, the beast’s hot blood pooling on the front of Eddie’s shirt, soaking it. The stink of the beast’s death odor was pungent.

“How did you know where to stab it?” Holliday asked. “My shot didn’t even slow it down.”

Eddie staggered to his knees and pushed the sow aside.

“My older brother Domingo and I used to hunt them at our uncle’s farm in Holguin Province,” Eddie answered.

“I guess we lucked out,” said Rafi.

“Don’t be quite so sure,” answered Holliday, hearing a series of familiar clicking sounds. Everyone looked in his direction as four young boys between nine and twelve stepped out of the jungle, their expressions flat and emotionless, the AK-47s in their arms rock steady. Holliday stared. They’d gone from Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth to Lord of the Flies in the blink of an eye.

The Krone restaurant and bar was exactly as Euhler had described it, lots of glass and gleaming marble behind a classic facade of white half-timbered buildings on a white half-timbered street where even the cobblestone appeared to have been polished recently.

Lenny Euhler had changed out of his suit and was now wearing a pair of tight blue jeans, penny loafers and a pale blue roll-neck sweater. The eyeglasses had gone from black to bright red. He was sitting at the bar drinking a mojito and trying to look bored. There was already an empty glass beside him and a chewed lime wedge.

Saint-Sylvestre sat down beside the banker and gave the man his best smile. Euhler seemed relieved, as though he’d been thinking that he’d allowed his supposedly secret sexuality to interfere with business and consequently had lost a half-billion-dollar deal for having offended Saint-Sylvestre by showing his true colors. Saint-Sylvestre added to poor Euhler’s relief by putting a hand on his shoulder and squeezing lightly. Fat and bone. No muscle. The banker’s eyes filled with tears of reassurance.

“Lenny! Been waiting long?”

“Just a few minutes, my dear Tarik,” he said, gesturing toward the empty glass. “I’ve gotten a little ahead of you, I’m afraid, but good tables are frightfully hard to get here at this hour, so I thought I’d get here early and cross the maitre d’s palm.”

“Don’t worry, Lenny; I can assure you that I’ll catch up.”

A bartender stopped and asked him what he wanted and Saint-Sylvestre ordered a margarita. “To keep in the festive mood.” He smiled.

“Excellent.” Lenny beamed.

After ten minutes of banker’s talk of interest rates and the global performance of one stock or another, their table was announced and they went into the restaurant, all crisp white linen and gleaming silver. Euhler had sauteed scallops on a mesclun salad to start and Saint-Sylvestre had the requisite steak tartare with a bright yellow egg yolk perched on the top. This was followed by tandoori chicken breast with wasabi for Euhler and a simple whitefish with almond butter for Saint-Sylvestre, trying to recover from the scoop of bloody ground sirloin with its single yellow egg-yolk eye. All of this was washed down with several bottles of Castanar Riserva Barrique 2005, a Swiss red that was surprisingly drinkable.

As the meal progressed, Saint-Sylvestre sipping his wine while Euhler gulped his, the conversation went from the general to the specific, slowly but surely honing in on the potential for mineral investment in Africa, led in that direction by Saint-Sylvestre’s gentle prodding. Given that he’d found Euhler’s business card in the same anonymously owned flat as Sir James Matheson and Francois Nagoupande, it seemed likely that Matheson was arranging some mineral licensing agreement with Nagoupande in return for giving the newly created brigadier general Kukuanaland’s and Kolingba’s heads on the same platter.

The coincidence of Kukuanaland’s coup and a sudden mineral find by Matheson would be a little hard for the world press to swallow, not to mention a crown investigating committee into Matheson’s business practices being established just down the street at Westminster, so the mining magnate had to be using Euhler’s services to distance himself from both the coup and the mineral find. The question was, How?

After a third bottle of wine and a two-octave rise in Euhler’s voice, Saint-Sylvestre suggested that they return to the banker’s apartment for the promised nightcap. Euhler was pleased as punch and insisted on walking through the cobblestone streets down toward the Aar River, for which the town was named.

According to Lenny, Aarau was located in something called the “golden triangle” of Zurich, Bern and Basel, making it one of the fastest-growing municipalities in the country. It also offered great prospects for people wishing to invest their money. Saint-Sylvestre made it quite clear that the investors he represented were interested in natural resources generally and gold, silver and platinum specifically. They were, according to Saint-Sylvestre, extremely practical people. Lenny gave him a melodramatic wink and squeezed his arm tighter. “I may have just the thing for you, Tarik, my dear.”

Euhler’s apartment turned out to be an ultramodern white concrete ziggurat overlooking the river and the foothills of the Jura Mountains. It was quite lavish for a pied-a-terre, with two bedrooms, two full bathrooms, one en suite, a living room, a dining room and a home office. Saint-Sylvestre was pleased to notice that there were no obvious security cameras, which was a bonus; he’d definitely been recorded at the bank, but only as one of a number of calls.

“Do much work at home?” Saint-Sylvestre asked mildly, peeking into the room. The computer was a top-end Acer Veriton with a landing pad for a number of specialty bank peripherals, including a real-time stock exchange ticker. The furniture was all steel and black and leather and the only decoration on the wall was a seventy-inch TV tuned to some digitized program that showed a waterfall in a forest somewhere. The same thing appeared as a screen shot on the computer. Saint-Sylvestre noted that one drawer of the desk was actually a small safe, complete with a digital combination lock.

“Sometimes.” Lenny nodded, leaning into the room behind Saint-Sylvestre, making sure their hips touched agreeably. “I have a direct link with the computer at the bank, so I can sometimes get a jump on my colleagues, especially as far as currency trading and precious metals are concerned.” It was interesting that the alcoholic slur seemed to leave the man’s voice when he talked about money.