Paul Christopher - The Templar conspiracy

"So he wasn't shot by Aknikh?" Peggy asked.

"He couldn't have been," answered Holliday. "He was definitely shot from above and from the left."

"The balcony," said Jefferson.

"What balcony?"

"There's a balcony in the town hall. It's used for storage now."

"Then he wasn't the shooter," Peggy said. "The whole thing was a setup."

"It looks that way." Holliday nodded. He turned to Jefferson. "Who else has seen these photographs?"

"A guy from the FBI came around and said he had a warrant to impound them all as material evidence. He asked me if I had copies but I said no."

"You lied?" Peggy asked.

"They're my pictures, aren't they?" Jefferson huffed.

"They may be your death warrant," said Holliday. "If I were you I'd hop in that new Porsche of yours and get the hell out of town."

"Why? I haven't done anything wrong. I have my rights."

"Maybe they'll put that on your tombstone," said Holliday. "The fact is, people in high places are laying in a cover-up and you and your pictures are a loose end. These people snip off loose ends without even thinking about it."

"Take his advice," said Peggy. "Pack your bags and run like hell."

"Kate Sinclair had a script all along," said Holliday as they drove away. "First the Pope, which gets the vice president to travel to Rome, then the VP gets killed and then her son plays the wounded martyr."

"And now he's the VP," said Peggy.

"I've met Kate Sinclair," said Holliday, his tone grim. "She'd never go to all this trouble to wind up settling for second-best. The script doesn't have an ending… yet."

They were less than a mile out of town when they were pulled over by a red-and-gold West Virginia State Police cruiser. Holliday waited for the inevitable; he had only his own identification and no papers for the old pickup truck. When they ran his name through the computers, all hell was going to break loose.

As the trooper approached, bundled up in his uniform parka, Holliday rolled down his window. The trooper bent down and looked inside the car. The man had a hard, lean face, his eyes hidden behind aviator-style mirrored sunglasses.

"Afternoon," said the trooper. Out of the corner of his good eye Holliday saw the cop's partner approaching Peggy's side. A woman. The female trooper rapped on Peggy's window with the knuckle of her index finger. Peggy rolled down the window.

"What's the problem?" Holliday asked.

"No problem, Colonel Holliday." He lifted up his hand and shot Holliday in the chest with an X3 Taser. In the passenger's seat Peggy was already going into convulsions. Within twenty seconds they were both unconscious.

He knew very little. Wherever he was, it was windowless, utterly dark and concrete. He knew it was concrete because he could feel its surface under his hands. By his count it was twenty paces long and twelve paces wide. With his arms outstretched he couldn't touch the ceiling, which meant it was taller than eight feet. In the center of the unreachable ceiling was a blower vent that cycled off and on regularly. The air was cool, maybe a little less than seventy degrees. Chilly but bearable. There was a single door, a slab of metal with a felt strip glued to the foot to blot out any ambient light, with hinges on the outside. There was a metal, lidless, tankless toilet and a sink built into the end wall. He was in a large, purpose-built holding cell.

He knew a few other things. There was a vague but clear scent of aviation fuel blown in through the vent system, which meant his jail bunker was part of or very close to an airport facility of some kind. They'd taken his clothes and he seemed to be dressed in some oversized boiler suit and rubber thongs. Prison garb. By his own estimation he'd been under for close to forty-eight hours, but it could have been longer. He had no recollection of anything after the powerful jolt of electricity he'd received.

He didn't actually know but he was pretty sure what happened after that. The diplomatic term the State Department used these days was "extraordinary rendition" and it had been around since Reagan's day. The simple term was "kidnapping." Take a subject off his home turf and do whatever you wanted to him in places just like this: black sites. Another euphemism, for "torture chamber."

He knew he could be almost anywhere. The CIA and the Joint Chiefs maintained black sites in almost every country in Europe and in a dozen or more sympathetic countries around the world. They used everything from Gulfstream Vs to Lears and even a couple of Boeing "Biz" Jets wearing phony tail numbers and registrations.

The whole system had a whiff of Nazism to it and from the first time he'd encountered it back in Afghanistan it had offended Holliday's sense of military honor. You fought wars out in the open, not by skulking under rotting logs and damp stones. The CIA for its part was supposed to gather intelligence, not act like a modern-day version of the Spanish Inquisition.

Suddenly a wire-covered fluorescent fixture in the ceiling flickered to life, buzzing and clicking for a few seconds before giving out a steady light. Holliday blinked and covered his eyes in the sudden glare. A moment after the light came on the metal door opened and three men appeared dressed in generic BDUs that didn't look like any American camouflage pattern he'd ever seen. The caps were a little odd, too-the bills were quilted and they had fold-up earflaps. The design was clearly Eastern European-Russian, Czech or Bulgarian. He was somewhere behind what used to be called the Iron Curtain.

The first two men were carrying a small metal table. The third man carried a pair of metal straight chairs. They set them down in the center of the room directly under the light fixture.

"Holloa." Nothing. Not Bulgarian.

"Csak keveset beszelek magyaru." No response. Not Hungarian.

"WyliA? mi dupe, matkojebca." Definitely not Polish.

"Dobra Den. Do prdele." A slightly turned head and a small look of surprise on one of the men carrying the table.

Gotcha, thought Holliday. They were Czech. The last time he'd been in the Czech Republic had been more than a year ago with the Sinclair girl on a wild-goose chase that had almost killed him.

The three men left the room. They also left the door open. Holliday didn't move from his position on the floor. A reed-thin figure, cigarette in hand, appeared in the doorway.

"Mrs. Sinclair," said Holliday as Kate Sinclair walked into the dungeonlike room. The tip of her cigarette glowed. She was wearing a very expensive Chanel pin-striped power suit.

"So nice to be remembered." The elderly woman smiled.

"You must be very pleased," said Holliday. "A heartbeat away from the White House. Too bad he didn't earn the position on merit."

"We're not here to talk about my son, Colonel. We're here to talk about you and something that rightfully belongs in our family."

"How did you find us so quickly?" Holliday asked, avoiding the subject of Brother Rodrigues's notebook.

"We've had you watched for weeks." She paused, blew smoke and inhaled again. "Now, let us get down to business."

"This is the second time I've been kidnapped by your little group," said Holliday, stalling. The Sinclair matriarch sighed.

"I'd hardly call it a 'little' group," she answered. "The membership of Rex Deus is considerably larger than you might think. We have a great many members in high places."

"People who can make other people disappear? People who can fake assassination attempts?"

"You mean my son?" Sinclair shook her head. "That was easy in comparison to killing the Pope."

"If you were setting me up as some kind of patsy, why make me vanish now?" Holliday asked. "I should be brought down in a hail of bullets somewhere, with the media invited to the finale."