Paul Christopher - The Templar conspiracy

"What if Jefferson is under surveillance?" Peggy asked nervously.

"Where?" Holliday laughed. "The street is empty, the houses are a hundred yards apart and there's no one around. It's too damn cold. There's no place to hide around here and, besides, why would anyone want to put a newspaper photographer under surveillance?"

"So far we've had the CIA, the Secret Service, the Italian police and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police coming after us. Why not the Bedford Mills Police force?"

"Only one way to find out," said Holliday. He zipped up his ski jacket, then climbed out of the car. Peggy followed, muttering under her steaming breath.

Holliday reached the rickety front steps and climbed up to the equally rickety stoop. The closed curtains on the front windows looked as though they'd been made from Star Wars sheets-tiny images of C3PO and R2D2 repeated endlessly. He glanced over at the Porsche. It was so new you could still see little scraps of the dealer's label on the passenger's side window. Give this Jefferson credit; he'd established his newfound wealth in record time. Holliday knocked on the door.

From inside the house he could hear the sound of a television blaring, the Brain telling his friend Pinky of yet another plan to take over the world. Hearing the Animaniac cartoon, Holliday realized that it was Saturday. Suddenly the door was jerked open by a man in red-and-blue pajamas, holding a half-eaten Pizza Pop in one hand. It smelled revolting and was oozing red sauce over the man's hand. He was in his forties, with thin brown hair and an oval face pitted from adolescent acne, and was wearing heavy wire-framed spectacles. He had a small mouth and no chin at all.

"What?" said the man.

"I'd like to talk to you about the town hall meeting you covered a few nights back."

"Screw off," said the man. "I'm watching TV." He slammed the door but Holliday managed to get his foot in first.

"It's important," said Holliday, trying to keep his voice even.

"I told you, screw off!" said the man, pushing as hard as he could against the door. Holliday reached into the pocket of his jacket and pulled out the ancient Beretta Storm that Brennan had lent him. He poked the heavy barrel through the space in the door, aiming the old automatic at the man's midsection.

"Step inside the house," said Holliday.

The man's eyes widened behind the glasses and his hands shot up in the air, squeezing the contents of the Pizza Pop out onto his hand and arm. He stumbled backward into the house. Holliday followed. Peggy came last, shutting the door behind her.

"Is this a robbery?"

"No."

"Who are you? All the money's in the bank."

"I told you it wasn't a robbery."

"Then what do you want?"

Holliday sighed. Back to square one.

"We want to know what went on at the town hall meeting."

"Can I sit down?"

"Certainly," Holliday said with a nod.

Jefferson's living room was a slum. Newspapers were everywhere, Chinese take-out containers and pizza boxes were scattered around on tables and chairs, and the long, gold-colored couch had crumpled clothes draped over the back. He popped the empty shell of the Pizza Pop into his mouth, licked most of the goop off his hand and arm, then wiped off the rest with an old shirt hanging over the couch. He sat down. The television, a huge flat-screen on the opposite wall with equally massive speakers, blared out the Brain's most famous expression: "Are you pondering what I'm pondering, Pinky?"

"Turn it off," said Holliday, raising his voice over the sinister musings of the hairless mouse. Jefferson manipulated the remote and the Brain cut off in midponder.

"The town hall meeting," prompted Holliday.

"The senator got shot. The shot made him vice president. He got lucky; I got lucky."

"How many pictures did you take?"

"Lots."

"What does that mean?"

"Maybe two hundred or so. It's easy with digital."

"What camera?" Peggy asked.

"Nikon D90."

"How were you shooting? Single-frame or video?" The D90, Peggy knew, was one of the very few single-lens-reflex cameras capable of shooting something as complex as a full-length feature film. It had already been used to shoot more than one television commercial.

"I was shooting single frames in the beginning. Establishing stuff-you know, crowds, a few local big guys 'cause they want to feel important. You know. For the speech I went to video. That's how I caught the shot so well, the one of the senator and his mom. I just isolated that single frame and sold it."

"Where's the rest?"

"On my computer."

"Get it," Holliday said.

The computer turned out to be a Sony Vaio Z with a gigantic 358-gigabyte hard drive. Peggy gingerly picked up the assorted garbage on the coffee table in front of the couch and carried it to the kitchen. She came back a moment later with a stricken look on her face.

"It's a war zone in there," she whispered to Holliday. "There are things growing in the sink and there's a nest of little spiders in the cutlery drawer."

"Fruit flies, too," said Jefferson, overhearing her comment. "I got a real problem with them, as well. I don't know where all the damn bugs come from." He frowned. "Maybe I should call an exterminator or something."

"Buy some Venus flytraps," muttered Peggy

"Show me the pictures," said Holliday.

Jefferson brought up a file and opened it. He began running through the pictures he'd taken. The first several dozen were taken from somewhere in the town hall parking lot and showed various individuals arriving. There was nothing of particular interest until Jefferson took up a position along with several other photographers in what had once been the orchestra pit. From that position he took a series of panoramic shots of the audience and then turned his attention up to the stage as Senator Sinclair appeared and took his place behind the podium.

"Go back," said Peggy, looking over Jefferson's shoulder. "Five frames or so."

"Sure." Jefferson clicked back through the pictures.

"There," said Peggy, "there's your man." The photograph showed a man in his early thirties, blank-faced, white and beardless. He was dressed in chinos and a red nylon, quilted ski jacket, and was sitting on the far right of a middle aisle. He didn't look anything like the classic, wild-eyed jihadist. He looked like he worked as a checker at a Piggly Wiggly store and Peggy said so.

"Just the kind of freak the senator's been talking about," said Jefferson. "He was right enough about that."

"Run the pictures ahead," said Holliday.

Jefferson did as he was told. Twenty frames further on Holliday stopped him. "This is the moment he gets hit." In the photograph Sinclair was halfway through a clockwise pirouette, thrown backward away from the podium, almost pushed to the floor by the impact. The camera swerved, searching through the audience for the shooter, then went back to the prostrate senator, sprawled on the floor, left hand clutching his right shoulder.

"Back, slowly," Holliday instructed.

Jefferson went back through the shots, back to the moment when Sinclair began to spin and fall.

"Stop."

Jefferson stopped.

"There's the problem," said Holliday. "Our friend the Dutch Arab is sitting to the right of the stage. With Sinclair facing the audience he should have been hit on the left, not the right. And if he was shot from the right the force of the impact would have turned him counterclockwise, not clockwise. Not to mention the fact that this man Aknikh was sitting below the senator. The bullet's trajectory would have been up, not down. He would have been pushed off his feet and backward by the shot, not straight down."

"Sounds like a lot of Kennedy-conspiracy gobbledygook," snorted Jefferson.

"A lot of that gobbledygook, as you call it, still hasn't been logically answered," Holliday said.