Paul Christopher - The Templar conspiracy

Randy, Sandy and Reggie had all been stars of the 1964 Winter Falls High School football team and they'd all gone off to serve in Vietnam two years later. Sandy Gorman had come back minus half a leg, and stumped around behind the counter on a prosthetic; Reggie Waterman scrambled eggs with a fork clamped to the hook that had once been his right arm. Randy returned with nothing but a Silver Star and a white streak of hair above his ear where a Vietcong bullet had creased his skull. In the years since, it had gradually earned him the nickname "Streak."

Winter Falls, New Hampshire, was a resort town and always had been. It was one of a half dozen towns that stood on the edge of Big Cache about sixty miles west of Portland, Maine, the closest city of any size. In winter the Falls had a population of a little more than six thousand. In summer it blew up to twice that, the number of parking tickets growing exponentially with enough revenue to pay the salaries of the entire sixteen-man, two-woman Winter Falls Police Department. There hadn't been a murder, rape or violent crime since the Hartwell twins' bizarre double suicide twelve years ago, and one missing person back in the mid-nineties that Streak Lockwood figured for a runaway. Pete Mc-Googan was a mean bastard living in the backwoods around Front Bay with a dull-witted wife and a beautiful sixteen-year-old who could have been a movie star. Her old man always had a strange, proprietary look on his face when he was around her, and if Streak had been in Cindy McGoogan's shoes he would have split for the big city himself.

Whatever it all was it amounted to Winter Falls being voted number one of the top-ten safest towns in America by Time magazine for the fourth year in a row. There were about a hundred copies of the issue in Zeke's Smokes and Sundries down the way, but Cyrus Dorchester at the Trumpet pretended that no one in town had heard and had a huge headline announcing FALLS #1 AGAIN!!!

The lake was just beyond Gorman's back-door patio and a sudden wind rattled the entire rickety, two-story clapboard building, the freezing air chattering through cracks in the joints and around the heavy double-pane storm windows. If it wasn't for the grill, ovens and fryers being fired up from dawn to dusk, the place would be as cold as the inside of a freezer.

Lockwood dropped down into his booth, his back to the wall under a 1974 Boston Bruins calendar turned to February so it eternally showed the rampaging Phil Esposito grinning with his front teeth out, Sandy Gorman's favorite, even if Esposito was a Canuck.

Reggie Waterman came out from behind the counter and slid onto the bench opposite Lockwood, a plate clamped in his steel claw and a cup of coffee in his good hand. He set the food down in front of his old friend and leaned back against the cracked green vinyl of the booth.

"Poached eggs on dry toast, one slice of bacon, no home fries and a cup of decaf coffee that tastes like brown water. You're letting that woman destroy your golden years, Streak. Booze, broads and bang."

"Sadly, Reg, those days on Duc Do Street are long gone. We're old men now."

"Yeah," snorted Reggie, waggling his bright steel claw in the hair. "I'm not half the man I used to be."

"And Maggie Irish is my doctor, not my wife," answered Randy. "Booze, broads and bang are harder on your cholesterol than any wife could ever be." There was an awkward pause. Reggie and Sandy had lost body parts in Vietnam, but Randy's wife, the former cheerleader Dory Cramer, had aborted the baby they'd conceived just before Randy shipped out, and ran off to be a big star in Hollywood. Nobody had ever seen her again. She was a year younger than the rest of them, which meant she was sixty now-probably playing grand-mothers in Depends ads if she was doing anything at all. More likely she'd hit the skids and died of an overdose decades in the past. Forever young; forever the thief of his child that was never allowed to be. It had always struck him as odd that he could hate someone so thoroughly who had disappeared from the face of the earth so long ago, and love someone so thoroughly who had never existed. How could you hate a ghost or love a shade?

"So how was Christmas, Streak?" Reggie asked.

"A positive love fest," said Lockwood, carving a dripping chunk of egg and toast away from the plate and popping it neatly into his mouth.

"Yule logs and chestnuts roasting?" Reggie asked.

"Something like that," said Lockwood. More like a can of Dinty Moore Beef Stew over the sink and endless reruns of Home Alone and It's a Wonderful Life. Once upon a time he'd liked the idea of Turner Classic Movies, but now they just made him think about other Christmases he'd rather not reminisce over. He'd tried to ignore the sappy holiday films, but everything else on cable depressed him even more. CNN was a constant stream of first the Pope getting blown out of his miter and then the attempt on the president. Fox News was full of Glenn Beck weeping along with that cracker idiot named Sinclair, who just happened to be the junior senator from New Hampshire, babbling about the "festering sore of domestic terrorism about to appear like the plague in America if something isn't done quickly." Yeah, Christmas had been a blast.

"So, you going to run for mayor?" Reggie asked. He waved his claw in the air and one of the harried waitresses brought him a mug of coffee. He sipped it and sighed happily.

"Why?" Lockwood smiled. "Just because Time magazine says I'd be a shoo-in? No, thanks."

"I'd get to call you Your Honor." Reggie grinned. "Better than the Blanchette woman."

"Snotty" Dotty Blanchette was in her sixties, unmarried and hard as nails. She'd started off as secretary to a town councilor and clawed her way up the municipal ladder. In a Republican town, she was all Democrat.

"Mayors come and mayors go," said Lockwood. "Even Dotty Blanchette." He broke his single strip of crispy bacon in half and popped it into his mouth. "Besides, nothing ever happens here. All I have to do is sit in my office, rescue cats from trees and eat doughnuts all day. The mayor has the real job."

There was a howl of freezing wind as the front door opened and shut. Streak Lockwood looked up and saw that it was a stranger. A tall, lean man in a long leather coat. He had longish dark hair and eyes half hidden behind tinted sunglasses. The only really odd thing about him was his out-of-season tan, and it didn't come from Sun-N-Go from up on Porter Street, either. Lockwood took a mental snapshot of the man and then got back to his poached eggs and his conversation with Reggie.

Billy Tritt found a space at the counter and sat down.

"He's right, this CIA friend of yours," said Brennan. A week had passed since the murder of the vice president and the secretary of state, and Holliday was clandestinely staying in Brennan's spacious apartment in the Palazzo del Quirinale, along with Peggy. The enormous insult Holliday's muscles and ribs had taken from Tritt's Glock had healed to a hand-span's livid bruise across his chest. "Historically you can seek sanctuary within the walls of the Vatican, but the new Holy Father is no friend of mine nor of Cardinal Spada, who will not be Vatican secretary of state much longer, I fear. You will have to leave, and soon. If word gets out that I've been harboring wanted fugitives, excommunication will be the least of it. It'll be like the McCarthy era all over again, or the Salem witch trials. They're on the hunt for any whiff at all of this Jihad al-Salibiyya, or whatever it's called."

"What will happen to you when the new secretary of state is selected?" Peggy asked.

"At best I'll be given a dreary parish in Sligo, where it rains sideways all day long and all the stray cats are always coughing with tuberculosis. If they find out about your involvement and my doings they'll quietly reach out for one of their assassini, who'll see to it that I fall down a flight of stairs or lean too far over a balcony while I'm watering the petunias."