Paul Christopher - The Templar conspiracy

The town hall itself was located on South Tower Street on the far side of the old Norfolk and Western tracks. It was only a few minutes' walk from the old Liberty Depot, which was now a family restaurant with cute menu items listed under titles like Main Line, Water Towers and Cabooses.

Once upon a time the town hall had been home to the Bedford Mills Klavern of the Ku Klux Klan. It was briefly used as a headquarters building by Stonewall Jack-son during the Civil War, and eventually became the local Mason's Lodge. The Masons faded away in the area, and in its final incarnation it was used as a recreation center by the Knights of Pythias.

Try as they might the Pythians couldn't keep up with the slow decay of the 150-year-old building and it was finally rescued by the Bedford Mills Historical Society, which bought it for a dollar, then brought it back to its former glory, then handed it over to the town. The ground floor was now the town library while the second-floor stage and auditorium were sometimes used for local theater productions, award presentations by local service clubs and events exactly like the one taking place this evening.

The original dressing rooms were located behind the stage and had been redecorated from the burlesque era for some unknown reason. There were posters of Fanny Brice everywhere and a couple of Moulin Rouge posters, as well. Each of the three dressing rooms had a small couch, a rotating makeup chair and a wall-to-wall mirror.

Kate Pierce had chosen the middle of the three rooms and had waited on the couch while Chelsea, the hired movie hair and makeup girl, made her son look even more senatorial than he was. She added salt-and-pepper highlights to his temples and a few age crinkles around the eyes for wisdom, and then helped him insert the gray contact lenses that dignified his washed-out blue eyes.

As a final touch Sinclair's mother handed her son a very up-to-date pair of cherry-red half-glasses to pull from his pocket when he was reading something or appearing to, even though at forty-six he still had twenty-twenty vision. When Kate was satisfied with her son's appearance she gave the hair and makeup girl a hundred dollars and dismissed her.

"Is all of this really necessary, Mother?"

"It's television, dear," answered the elderly woman. "If Nixon had worn a little pancake that night in Chicago things might have gone very differently."

"Local?"

"Network, cable, bloggers, the New York Times. Fox, looking for blood. The message is beginning to get through, darling, just as I knew it would."

"I'm still not sure about this, Mother," said the senator, a worried expression on his perfectly made-up face. "With the Pope being assassinated and the vice president dying… There's been so much violence, I don't think I should look as though I'm advocating more."

"Not advocating, dear; warning about it. Our borders are like sieves; the economy is in the sewer; the poor, the homeless and the unemployed are at the end of their rope. There's bound to be a groundswell of grassroots violence that will spread through the country like wildfire unless something is done about it, and quickly." Since Kate Sinclair wrote her son's speeches it wasn't surprising that she could quote from them at length.

"That's like asking for martial law. A dictatorship," argued the senator.

"We're not asking for either one. We're asking for the strong America of the past. Better security. Vigilance. The ability to find our enemies and destroy them before they do the same to us."

"How about something like this," suggested the senator, the timbre of his voice adopting its senatorial edge. "Guantanamo was a failure because we didn't annex the whole damn island during the Spanish-American War and Kennedy didn't have the courage to invade properly at the Bay of Pigs in 'sixty-one. As for the Japanese, it's been almost seventy years since Pearl Harbor. It's ancient history and so are the internment camps. If a reporter or anyone else asks about places like Manzanar, we counter with Changi in Singapore."

"Excellent." Kate Sinclair beamed.

"When is it scheduled to happen?" the senator asked.

"Better if you don't know exactly, dear. It will seem more natural."

"He knows what to do?"

"He's the best," assured the senator's mother.

"And when it happens?"

"Act the part," said Kate Sinclair. "Sic semper tyrannis but with a happy ending."

The auditorium had seating for a 180 people and standing room under the balcony for 60 more. The balcony itself had long ago by default turned into a storage area for old props and costumes, since the hall was rarely used for theatrical productions now that the Mountain View Cinema had closed down and was the home of the Bedford Little Theater.

Tonight the auditorium was packed, mostly with locals but also with reporters and cameramen from all the national networks and newspapers. In the time since the assassination of the Pope and the death of the vice president, Senator Richard Pierce Sinclair had gone from being an obscure albeit handsome junior senator with a strident message that almost never made the news to a pundit on CNN when it came to issues of terrorism. He was a regular guest on everything from Meet the Press to Glenn Beck's TV and radio shows, and "author" of an upcoming book titled American Terror, which had already been accepted for publication by Regnery Publishing, the foremost conservative publisher in the nation.

Tonight was Senator Sinclair's eighth town hall meeting, and the most heavily attended by the national press. When he was interviewed the week before on Larry King Live, the comment was made that in recent days it seemed as though the senator was campaigning for president. His reply was a nice, gap-toothed smile and the perfectly scripted response: "Not this year, Larry. Being a senator is enough for any American."

As usual, security at the meeting was provided by the Blackhawk Security, a subsidiary of Kate Sinclair's main corporation, the modern version of the original Crusader Pipe and Tile Corporation, now generally known as IPT International. There was a pair of armed guards at each of the four exits, and a metal detector and a wand-carrying guard at the main entrance. There were four more guards close to the stage and two out in the parking lot.

The guards were dressed like Secret Service agents, complete with lapel pins and wrist microphones. This was no coincidence; Kate Sinclair was well aware that presentation was everything these days and the Secret Service- style guards were nothing more than an extension of the makeup that Jack Kennedy used-and Richard Nixon didn't-during the debate in 1960.

Senator Sinclair appeared on stage at eight fifteen p.m., exactly on time. He looked composed, with a slight touch of the humble in his demeanor. Tonight, given the small-town, essentially rural audience, he was wearing old lace-up shoes, well-worn blue jeans and a brown sports jacket over an open-necked, plain white shirt. His Yale ring was missing, and his usual Rolex President had been replaced by a Timex Indiglo.

The ruddiness and color of his cheeks, given to him by Chelsea the makeup girl, lent him the appearance of a man who spent a great deal of time outdoors. Educated at places like Exeter and Yale, the senator had long since lost any trace of his native Virginia accent, but like any good politician he was able to affect the twangy drawl of his youth any time he wanted-the help of a speech coach his mother hired for him every summer didn't hurt.

As usual Senator Sinclair's opening remarks took the form of a canned speech he'd given dozens of times before about the threat of domestic terrorism. It was peppered with sound bites for the networks, and while it never mentioned American-born Muslims as the generators of such terrorism the speech inevitably mentioned that there were "as many as" five million Muslims in the United States, which provided a "rich environment" for extreme political views. The overall feeling was that the Muslim community was growing by leaps and bounds and would soon surpass Christianity's slim numerical majority in the world unless something was done, and done soon.