Paul Christopher - The Templar conspiracy

The strange silence went on for a long minute, and then there was a harsh whispering voice: "Yellah! Yellah!" Someone speaking Arabic.

The hooded prisoners began to chatter, some of them laughing, and Holliday felt a slackness in the chains threaded through the I-bolt at his feet. There was more chatter and then silence. Only a few seconds passed and then there was the stuttering hammer of an automatic weapon.

"What's happening?" Peggy whispered.

"I don't think our Farsi friends got the reception they were hoping for," said Holliday.

There was another period of silence and then the sound of booted footsteps coming in their direction. Three men appeared, all carrying folding stock Czech Skorpion submachine guns and all dressed identically in black, wearing Kevlar body armor and black balaclavas covering their faces. One of them appeared to be a woman.

One of the men stopped in front of Holliday's little enclosure. He slung his light machine gun over his shoulder, then took a pair of heavy-duty bolt cutters off his belt, silently snipped the shackles at Holliday's feet and threaded the chain through his handcuffs. He took the bolt cutters and slid them back onto his belt, then reached into the side pocket of his combat trousers and took out a small key. He unlocked the handcuffs and took a step back.

"You're free, Colonel Holliday."

Holliday looked at him strangely. There was something in the rasping voice that seemed familiar.

"Don't recognize me, Colonel?"

The man reached up and pulled off the knitted balaclava that covered his head. He smiled down at his old adversary and quoted from the New Testament: "And when he thus had spoken, he cried with a loud voice, Lazarus, come forth. And Lazarus walked."

The man standing over him laughed, the scar on his throat as thick as a curled red worm. "I was in bandages for months."

It was Antonin Pesek, the Czech assassin he'd shot and killed in Venice more than a year before.

The Penzion Akat was a tobacco-colored, stucco-fronted hotel that overlooked the railway tracks and the streetcar terminal at the Smichov metro station in western Prague. The building was without any architectural distinction whatsoever-one step above a flophouse where a noisy night's sleep could be had for a few crowns, and where the cracked china rattled on the tables in the cafeteria-like dining room every time a streetcar rumbled by. It was totally anonymous, a place for traveling salesmen and tourists without much money.

"He's dead?" Holliday asked, coming out of the hotel room's coffin-sized bathroom.

"Double tap: one to the heart; one to the head. Very professional," said Pat Philpot, munching on a chicken leg from the KFC down the road. Peggy was sprawled in an overstuffed armchair on the opposite side of the room and Antonin Pesek, their savior on the road to Pankrac Prison, stood beside the grimy window, watching the street below.

"But why kill him? He didn't know anything. He was a local photographer who didn't know what he had."

"Jefferson knew you, Doc. That's what got him killed. Originally you were meant to be a fall guy. Now you and Ms. Blackstock are flies in the Sinclairs' ointment."

"The whole thing is too Byzantine," said Peggy. "It's a fairy tale, something out of the Brothers Grimm."

"The world is a Grimm place." Pesek smiled, briefly turning away from the window. "In the sixteenth century a Bohemian countess named Elizabeth Bathory liked to bathe in the blood of virgins she lured to her castle. As a serial killer she was much more prolific than your Theodore Bundy. Now that is truly Byzantine, my friend."

"So, where do you fit in the grand scheme of things?" Holliday asked Philpot.

The CIA analyst picked up a piece of chicken, then thought better of it and dropped the battered lump back into the bucket on the table. He wiped his lips with a napkin and belched discreetly.

"The Sinclair family has been a plague in D.C. since the beginning. They've got links and connections that go back to Donovan and Dulles and the old OSS boys-the Ivy League spies. They stuck themselves on the intelligence community like a flea on a dog and they never let go. There's been a cadre of Rex Deus members in Congress, the Senate, Justice and the Pentagon for decades. The old senator was too corrupt to ever make a move on his own-like Joe Kennedy and the bootlegging years. But he had the right connections and before he died he passed the mantle on to his grandson, and he passed it on to his wife, the venerable Kate. Now she's finally making the move that the old man dreamed about."

"Putting her son in the White House." Holliday nodded.

Philpot gave a hollow laugh and tossed a chicken bone into the wastebasket beside him. "The White House? That's just the beginning."

"What's that supposed to mean?" Peggy asked.

"There was a movie a long time ago, back in the early sixties," said Philpot. "It was called Seven Days in May."

"Never heard of it," said Peggy.

"Ah, youth." Philpot smiled, judiciously plucking another piece of fried chicken from the bucket.

"I remember. It was about a military coup d'etat," said Holliday. "A general doesn't like the way a milksop president is dealing with the Russians over some missile treaty, so he plots to take over the United States by force of arms."

"That's the one," said Philpot. "And Kate Sinclair's about to do the same thing with the help of her little buddies in the Central Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon, General Angus Scott Matoon in particular. She doesn't care much for the way the present administration is giving away the store. She thought she had the power on Capitol Hill to get the poor bastard impeached. Now she's trying a back door to put her son on the throne and her behind it."

"In the movie the reason for the coup d'etat was a lily-livered missile treaty the general honestly believed was crippling America's power. What's Kate Sinclair's excuse?"

"What do you think was the best thing that ever happened to George W? What got him elected for a second term and allowed him to start a phony war in Eye-Raq. The best thing that could happen to any president you can name?"

"Bin Laden and 9/11," offered Peggy. "Saddam Hussein and the phantom weapons of mass destruction."

"A common enemy," said Holliday.

"A rallying cry. One if by land, two if by sea, the English are coming! The English are coming!" Peggy said. "Jihad al-Salibiyya."

"The whole thing's crazy," said Holliday. "Does she really think her son getting winged by a fake terrorist is enough leverage to overthrow the government?" He shook his head. "There isn't one politician in the U.S. of A. who is that stupid."

"Which is saying something," rasped Pesek, still standing by the window. "Since there are many very stupid politicians there. More than here."

"She'd need another 9/11 to pull it off," said Peggy. "Something huge."

"Which is precisely what she intends." Philpot nodded, leaned back in his groaning chair, wiped his hands on a napkin and lit a cigarette. "Except this time it won't be a rich Saudi Arabian with daddy issues and a teeny-tiny weenie. This time it'll be a homegrown, Kansas-corn-fed, little-mosque-on-the-prairie domestic rag head, just like the poor martyred Senator Sinclair has been fog horning about for the past couple of years. The prez will be pressured by Matoon to declare martial law and if he won't do it he'll be impeached and replaced by the young senator. He's already in the VP's chair. There's only one thing left."

"Tom's Hill," whispered Holliday.

"What the hell is Tom's Hill?" Philpot scowled, irritated that the flow of his narrative had been interrupted.

"When we tossed Tritt's house in Lyford Cay-"

"You what?" Philpot stared, owl-eyed.