Paul Christopher - The Templar conspiracy

"We tossed Tritt's place at Lyford Cay… I'll tell you about it some other time. Anyway, I found a CD with a whole lot of information about a place called Tom's Hill. I didn't think much of it at the time, but now…"

"Now what?" Philpot asked.

"According to Tritt's CD, Tom's Hill has a population of only a few thousand but almost all of them are employed by a company called the King Fertilizer Corporation. King Fertilizer is the largest manufacturer of ammonium nitrate in the United States."

"Dear God," said Philpot, looking horrified.

"What's so bad about that?" Peggy asked. "What does fertilizer have to do with any of this?"

"Because ammonium nitrate is the basic ingredient for ANFO," said Pesek. "The explosive that was used in your Oklahoma City bombings." The dapper-looking assassin shook his head sadly. "You Americans really are crazy. The sale of such fertilizer has been regulated in Europe for years, but still anyone in your country can buy it by the ton, no questions asked." He poked back the sheer curtains and looked down at the street again. "Speaking about crazy Americans, it looks as though we have company."

Philpot was instantly alert. "What are they driving?" He drew a Glock 9 from his shoulder holster and jacked a round into the chamber.

"Lincoln Navigator," answered Pesek. He drew his own weapon, a Beretta 92, and took a stubby little suppressor out of his suit jacket pocket.

"Blackhawk," said Philpot. "Either that or our guys. How many?"

"Four," said Pesek. "Three in a group; one trailing."

"What are they carrying?"

"Backpacks."

"What kind of ordnance, do you think?"

"Probably FN P90s. Suppressed. The BIS uses them."

"BIS?" Peggy asked.

"Bezpec?nostni informac?ni sluzba," said Holliday. "The Czech Secret Police."

"How do we do this?" Philpot asked.

The Czech assassin didn't hesitate for a second. "We need to contain them. The trailing man will come up the stairs to block any attempt at escape. The other three will take the elevator and come into the room. They'll have a key card."

"How can you be so sure?" Peggy asked.

"Because you can bribe anyone in Prague, Ms. Blackstock. Hotel clerks come very cheap, young lady, I assure you." He nodded to Holliday. "You and your cousin into the bathroom. Lie down in the bathtub. Mr. Philpot, you take the stairwell."

"And you, Pane Pesek?" Philpot asked.

Pesek smiled and briefly touched his well-groomed mustache. "I shall be in my own room across the hall."

Philpot nodded and left the room.

"Quickly," said Pesek. "It will be soon now."

Holliday grabbed Peggy by the elbow and they headed for the bathroom. Pesek left the room, locking the door behind him.

"Didn't he try to kill you once?" Peggy asked, kneeling down in the old cast-iron tub.

"More than once actually," said Holliday, climbing in after her. "Not to mention the fact that I tried to kill him. I thought I had, as a matter of fact."

"And you still trust him?"

"I don't have to," said Holliday. "Philpot's paying for his services."

"What does that have to do with it?"

"Pesek's a pro. He survives on his reputation. He betrays the people who pay his fee and he never gets another job. He's blackballed for life and probably winds up getting a hit taken out on him."

"Murderers with ethics. What's next?" Peggy sighed.

"Shut up and bend down," said Holliday, crouching lower. "The bad guys will be here any second."

There was nothing but the faint clicking sound of the magnetic lock popping to announce their arrival and then a dull rattling sound like fifty ball bearings in a washing machine. Holes appeared in the bathroom door, the medicine chest mirror exploded and then there was silence.

"Do prdele!" said an angry voice.

"Do pic?e!" said another voice.

There was a brief silence and then the sound of Pesek's voice. "Dobry den, Zdvor?ili panove," said the assassin politely. There was a startled exclamation and then three clicks, like someone slowly winding an old-fashioned alarm clock, followed by three more.

"What the hell was that?" Peggy whispered, crouched down like a frog in the tub.

Holliday stood up. He could have been melodramatic and told her it was the sound of death, but he stayed silent.

"It's safe," said Pesek. "You can come out now, Colonel Holliday."

Holliday stepped out of the tub and opened the bathroom door. Peggy followed him.

"Holy crap!" Peggy said.

There were bleeding bodies all over the floor.

Pesek stood in the short hallway leading to the front door, unscrewing the suppressor from his weapon.

"Don't touch anything," he said. "And come with me quickly. There are probably more where these came from." He nodded at the corpses bleeding into the worn carpeting. "If not more of them, the police will arrive eventually. We must get you on your way."

"Where are we going?" Holliday asked. "We have no papers, no passports-nothing."

"Aix-les-Bains," said Philpot, stepping into the room and surveying the damage. "I have a friend there."

Billy Tritt and a boy named Stephen Barnes, one of the more technically minded of the skinhead, psychopathic members of Maine's Right Arm, stopped the stolen AT amp;T Southwest van beside the big junction box on Highway 18, a mile from the Tom's Hill plant of the King Fertilizer Corporation. Tritt switched off the engine and turned to the young man beside him. Both Tritt and Barnes were wearing official AT amp;T uniforms and hard hats taken from the bodies of the former occupants of the van.

"You know what to do, soldier?" Tritt asked firmly.

"Yessir." Barnes nodded. "Open the junction box and look for a yellow T1 line cable. Where the yellow cable joins the main bundle I insert a three-way and run a secondary line back to you in the van."

"Good," said Tritt. "Got your tools?"

"Yessir." Barnes patted the weighty belt around his waist.

"The three-way?"

Barnes nodded and dug into the upper pocket of his slightly bloodstained uniform pocket and found the large, chrome connector piece. He held it up. "Right here, sir," the young man answered proudly. He hadn't graduated from Lincoln Technical Institute because of money and some drug problems, but he knew what he was doing. If he'd graduated he could have worked for any cable TV company in the state, although the two years at Wynd-ham Correctional really screwed him when it came to getting jobs.

"Good. Off you go, then, soldier."

Barnes, eager as a 260-pound, muscle-bound puppy, clambered out of the van and set up the traffic cones just like he'd been told, even though there wasn't a car for miles. The scenery was bleak-endless stretches of wind-swept, dirty snow over stubbled cornfields that went on forever.

The junction box was a big green thing just off the shoulder. Barnes took a short crowbar out of his tool belt, snapped the lock and got down to work, looking for the T1 line that fed the fertilizer plant's routing information to the servers at the API Logistics center in Wichita. API was the dedicated contract carrier that shipped King Fertilizer's product to its various locations.

It took Barnes fifteen minutes to find the T1 line and another ten to feed a line from the box to the little porthole in the side of the van. Tritt took the cable, crimped on a connector and fit the line onto his Hewlett-Packard laptop. Within a minute or so he'd made his way onto the server at King Fertilizer and had diverted four container loads of ammonium nitrate prills to the dedicated King Fertilizer International docks in Baltimore.

A few more keystrokes and he set the proper authorization codes for the drivers he would send for the shipment, routing the fertilizer from Baltimore to Maine via Triskip Carriers, a container barging service that served multiple shippers carrying mixed cargo from Baltimore to New Jersey, New York, Boston and Portland, then connecting onward to Halifax and Montreal.