Paul Christopher - The Templar conspiracy

"Doc! There's two of them! We're in a room at the back!"

Both Peggy and Brennan clearly heard the raised voices outside the door.

"Mario! Chiuso loro in su!" Shut them up.

"Figlio di Puttana!"

There was the sound of pounding feet.

"He's coming in!"

Which was just what Peggy wanted. As the door opened she launched herself forward at a dead run, hurling herself at the doorway like a charging bull, head-butting the man named Vittorio in the groin and sending him flying backward to collide with Mario, who was standing in the middle of a small living-dining area.

They went down in a tumbled heap of arms and legs, and Mario's weapon went flying across the hardwood floor. Mario managed to throw off Peggy and crab walk his way across the floor toward the weapon while Peggy turned her attention toward Vittorio, who was screaming and holding his ankle, which was now twisted at a grotesque angle.

Peggy went for Vittorio's eyes, hooking her index fingers into his ears and her thumbs into the eye sockets just like Doc had taught her. She pressed hard and the razor-thin edges of her nails punctured both eyeballs, covering Peggy's hands in a rush of warm fluid and changing Vittorio's scream into a screech of terrified agony as he suddenly went blind.

Out of the corner of her eye Peggy saw Mario reach his pistol and turn it toward her. Off to her left the front door opened and Mario swung the weapon toward the new threat. Holding the pistol two-handed he pulled the trigger, but it was too late. Holliday came into the room in a low roll, stitching an entire clip of fifteen 10mm bullets in Mario's direction. Mario's shots had gone high. Holliday's were low, almost cutting the kneeling man in half. Peggy head-butting Mario to the gruesome blinding of Vittorio and Mario's execution had taken no more than thirty seconds. The room was full of the hot-sharp smell of gunfire and Vittorio's screaming. Peggy clambered to her feet.

"Honey, I'm home!" Holliday grinned from the doorway.

Peggy stumbled toward him. "That's the worst Ricky Ricardo I've ever heard." She threw herself into his arms, then burst into sobs.

Brennan came out of the back room, frowning. "Now, which one of you is going to fetch me my other shoe?"

Lieutenant John Charles Fremont sat at the communications center in the basement of the Pentagon, scrolling through that day's orders from the Joint Chiefs. The particular bunker he and a dozen other men and women occupied was officially known as a Crisis Control Operations Center, and on this particular midnight-to-eight shift he was the designated communications watch officer. In other words, in Pentagon-speak he was the DC-CWO of the JCS CCOC. Unofficially, he was King Rat of the Big Cheese Rat Hole. Sergeant Knox Bellingham, the man seated beside him, was a senior console operator, more simply known as a Big Rat.

"You been noticing a lot of traffic for something called Prairie Fire?" Lieutenant Fremont said.

"Yes, sir," said Bellingham. "I've got personnel tickets for a whole bunch of people en route to Colorado Springs, Houston, and Sunnyvale, California."

"You notice anything weird, Sergeant?"

"Yes, sir," answered Bellingham, squinting at the screen in front of him. "They're all O-one to O-six. And they're all SOCOM."

Fremont sat back in his chair and looked at the screen pulsing in front of him. All of them on duty were officers, from lieutenant to lieutenant colonel, and all were part of the Special Operations Command. Colorado Springs was NORAD and the Consolidated Space Operations Center, Houston was NASA and Sunnyvale was the Air Force Satellite Test Center. Put them together and you had the complete command-and-control capabilities for every military communications satellite in the sky.

"What's the transit coding on the orders?" Fremont asked.

"USTRANSCOM." Bellingham responded, checking the file on his screen. That made sense, sort of. USTRANSCOM stood for United States Transport Command.

"Subcoding?"

That made sense, too-Defense Courier Service, Airborne Military Command, the people who transferred sensitive material from one place to the other.

"What about the unit budget line?" Every individual unit within a larger command had its own designation for defense budgeting purposes. It was where the buck stopped, literally.

"Never heard of it," Fremont said, frowning. In Pentagon-speak STRATCOMCON probably stood for Strategic Communications Control, and Prairie Fire was probably some kind of operation it was running. Given the number of officers being shifted around, it was going to wind up costing the taxpayers a load of dollars. He made a query note about it in the computer log and then forgot all about it. The weekend was coming up and he was going hiking with his girlfriend in Cunningham Falls State Park in the Catoctin Mountains. One more night of being cooped up in the bunker and he'd be out in the fresh air. He couldn't wait.

"So, what do we do now?" Brennan asked from the backseat of the big VW luxury car. They were heading south just beyond Les Contamines, ninety minutes away from the Geneva airport.

"I'm phoning Pat Philpot in D.C., and you're calling your people at the Vatican and any bigwig antiterrorist cops you know in Rome," said Holliday from behind the wheel. "We've got to get to the cops with what we know about Tritt and our so-called Jihadist friends. The funeral is the day after tomorrow."

"They took our cell phones," said Peggy.

"Mine, too," said Holliday. "They've got satellite phones at the airport. We'll call from there."

"You have an address book?" asked Brennan. Peggy turned in her seat; the priest had that feral, Gollum-like tone in his voice again.

"I keep some numbers in my head. I know Pat's by heart," Holliday answered.

"By the time we get to the airport it'll be past midnight in the States," said Peggy, checking her watch. It was almost five a.m., Geneva time.

"So I'll get his big, fat ass out of bed," replied Holliday.

When the satellite phone pinged, General Angus Scott Matoon was over the mid-Atlantic aboard one of the army's blandly designated C-37 transports, which was a drab military euphemism for a leather-chaired and whisper-quiet Gulfstream G650. The Pentagon, for whatever reason, had 120 of the forty-seven-million-dollar aircraft.

He unlimbered the receiver from its mount on the bulkhead. "Yes?"

"Neville, sir."

His adjutant-a bloodless, lickspittle, brownnoser forced on him by Kate Sinclair, more a spy for her than an assistant to him. As Matoon had long ago discovered, Sinclair had little moles like Neville everywhere, even in the White House, although no one was absolutely sure who that was. Sinclair was a firm believer in the adage that good intelligence was the basis of a good offense.

"What is it?" Matoon asked brusquely. The ice was melting in his glass of Bourbon on the table in front of him. The interior of the aircraft was dark except for the pool of light over his comfortable leather swivel chair and the glow of the computer screen in its niche across the aisle.

"We have a situation, General."

The satellite phone on a jet used by a member of the Joint Chiefs was probably as secure as you could get, but there was always the possibility that the NSA simply monitored and recorded all government and military calls as a matter of protocol. It was perhaps far-fetched, but not impossible, and Matoon hadn't gotten to his present position by being sloppy. Discretion, especially with the home office, was the rule.

"What kind of situation?"

"A prairie fire, sir."

"A bad one?"

"It's spreading slightly."

Which meant that somebody within the Pentagon had made a nominal query about either Prairie Fire or its big brother, STRATCOMCON. Nominal or not, any leakage at this point could be disastrous.