Paul Christopher - The Templar conspiracy

The inference was clear, even if only subliminally stated: America was a Christian nation. The currency said it, the Pledge of Allegiance said it, the Constitution of the United States said it, and so did the Declaration of Independence. It was an old and very American principal: he who is not my friend is by definition my enemy.

At exactly eight thirty, as applause and cheers echoed around the auditorium, every camera in the room was either in tight close-up of the senator as he appeared on the stage, looking slightly embarrassed by the adulation of his audience, or wide on a shot of the enthusiastic crowd as it clambered to its feet in a standing ovation. Senator Sinclair moved to center stage and stood in front of a simple lectern to give his speech.

According to the time code on the endlessly analyzed raw CNN tape it was 8:31:30:09 when someone on the far right side of the second row drew an odd-looking handgun from beneath his jacket and screamed out something in Arabic just before he fired. The man's voice was loud and clear in the high-ceilinged old hall.

"Bismillah ir-rahman ir-rahim! allahu akbar! la ilaha illa-llah!"

It took CNN in Atlanta barely five minutes to have the phrase translated: "For the glory of Allah, most merciful and most compassionate! Allah is great! Allah is the one true god!" According to the translator the dialect was either Egyptian or Syrian.

Completely vulnerable behind the simple lectern, the stricken Senator Sinclair spun around and crumpled to the floor. The gunman, still screaming, ran toward the fire exit on the right-hand side of the stage. A total of six Blackhawk security guards fired at the man independently, striking him eleven times in the head, neck and chest. He was dead long before he reached the floor, bone, blood and brains spattering in every direction.

Two hundred and thirty-two people in the auditorium ran for the stairs and the emergency exits. The first person to reach the fallen senator was his mother, who had been watching from the wings.

She fell to her knees and gathered her only son into her arms. The CNN cameraman who was one of the very few who had remained in position caught the shot perfectly. So did a local freelance photographer named Patrick Henry Jefferson, who worked mostly, but not exclusively, for the Bedford Mills Bulletin, and who shot the scene from a slightly but crucially different angle that caught the scarlet blossom of blood on the senator's snow-white shirtfront and the perfect look of maternal shock and anguish on Kate Sinclair's aging, handsome, aristocratic face.

Within three minutes of the shooting a tape was uploaded onto YouTube and a tweet went out on Twitter purportedly from the group Jihad al-Salibiyya taking credit for the attack on the senator and telling the world that after striking abroad they were now bringing the fight and the cause to America.

By morning Jefferson's photograph appeared in every newspaper in the United States, from broadsheet to tabloid, including front page above the fold in the New York Times. For Kate Sinclair, the publicity was priceless.

Forty-eight hours after the event itself, reading a script hastily written by Morrie Adler, the president announced that Richard Pierce Sinclair had been appointed to the vice presidency of the United States. By the end of the week it was the cover of People magazine and Time. Within ten days Patrick Henry Jefferson had a New York agent and slightly more than half a million dollars in the bank.

"This is a very, very, bad idea," said Peggy. She and Holliday were sitting in the cab of the old pickup truck they'd borrowed from Harry Moonblanket two days before. The battered old F150 was parked across from a plain white bungalow on West Federal Street in Bedford Mills. It was typical of most of the homes in the working-class Virginia town: slightly run-down, in need of paint and sitting on a half-acre lot crusted with a thin layer of old snow. A pink flamingo was frozen in place on the front lawn and the large area in the rear showed the hard, lumpy ruts of a vegetable garden. A carport with a fiberglass roof had been tacked on to the right side of the house like an afterthought. Sitting under the green, corrugated sheet of plastic was a brand-new, jet-black Porsche Turbo S.

"It's the only idea I have left," said Holliday. He scratched at the heavy bristle on his cheeks and chin-his early attempt at a disguise. With the eye patch he looked quite frightening. "We can't go back to the house in Georgetown, you can't go back to Rafi and I can't think of anyone else we can go to for help. We've got to figure this whole thing out by ourselves."

"What good is this guy going to be?" Peggy asked. "I still don't get it."

"Neither do I," answered Doc. "There's something wrong about it, just like Brennan and Philpot and all the rest. This guy Jefferson was there. Maybe he saw something we missed. It's worth a shot."

"And if he turns around and blows the whistle on us?"

"Then we're no worse off than we are right now," said Holliday. "On the run with no place to go."

The gun used to shoot the newly appointed Vice President of the United States had been a short-barreled Walther P22 semiautomatic pistol that had been purchased quite legally at a local Bedford Mills gun store. The identification provided by the purchaser had identified him as Theodore Douglas Trepanik, a resident of Bocock, Virginia, a double-wide trailer park suburb of Lynchburg. Further investigation had uncovered that Trepanik was employed as a technician for Falwell Aviation at the nearby Lynchburg Regional Airport.

As it turned out, Theodore Douglas Trepanik had passed away ten months previously and his trailer home in Bocock had been ransacked during the funeral. Although his wife, AnnieRuth Trepanik, had taken care to cancel all of her late husband's credit cards, she hadn't noticed that both his driver's license and Social Security card were missing from his wallet. The wallet had been on his bedside table along with his keys and reading glasses on the night of the massive heart attack that killed him.

Subsequent to the shooting, investigators from the FBI and Homeland Security discovered that the assassin had been registered at the Bedford Mills Super 8, using the Trepanik identification. Searching the room they found a Kuwaiti passport in the name of Shamed Khalil Zubai, as well as a Dutch passport in the name of Ismael Aknikh. The Kuwaiti passport showed an entry into the United States four months previously while the Dutch passport showed an entry into JFK in New York only two weeks before.

On that basis it was assumed that the name on the Kuwaiti passport was an alias and that Ismael Aknikh was the man's real name. According to the Dutch authorities Aknikh was thirty-two years old, born in Amsterdam of Moroccan immigrant parents. Both his parents were dead and he had no other known family in Amsterdam or anywhere else in the Netherlands. Beyond that the killer was a cipher, as was the group who took credit for the Sinclair shooting, as well as the assassination of the Pope: Jihad al-Salibiyya.

Ismael Aknikh and the Jihad al-Salibiyya were the fulfillment of Richard Sinclair's most dire predictions: an extremist Muslim terrorist organization centered in the United States; a festering wound that up until the night of the shooting had gone unnoticed.

At a press conference held at Walter Reed hospital in Washington the day after the shooting Kate Sinclair stated unequivocally that the attempt on her son's life was a call to action. All the intelligence, counterterrorist and federal police agencies, including Homeland Security, had failed to identify either Jihad al-Salibiyya or the threat that it represented. According to her, the attack was nothing less than an early warning of much worse to come, a clarion call to the American people and their government that another 9/11 was in the making. In closing Kate Sinclair then made her own ominous prediction: Jihad al-Salibiyya's next attack would almost certainly come sooner rather than later.