Paul Christopher - The Templar conspiracy

"You want something to eat?" Holliday asked. He had taken the aisle seat, giving Peggy the window.

"No, thanks."

"Drink?"

"No, I'm not thirsty," said Peggy, shaking her head. "Maybe later."

"Yeah, maybe later," said Holliday awkwardly. Another moment passed.

"What do you really know about Philpot?" Peggy asked finally.

The train began to sway and vibrate slightly as they hit the open countryside and continued to gain speed. "I know he and Pesek got us out of a lot of trouble yesterday. He's arranged for passports today. Stuff we couldn't have done ourselves."

"Like some kind of guardian angel-is that it?"

"I'm not sure."

"You ever wonder whose side he's on?" She frowned. "He could be part of Sinclair's scheme. He could be part of the rogue group within the Agency. Lies inside lies inside lies."

"Yes."

"Well?"

"I can't give you an answer because I don't know. I only know what he's done for us so far."

"There's something wrong with the world when you suspect that everybody's out to get you."

Holliday was silent for a moment. He stared at the striped fabric and the pull-down table on the seat ahead.

"You ever watch a TV show or read a book and come to a place where you stop and ask yourself, why don't they just go to the cops?"

"Sure," Peggy said. "It's like in a horror movie when the girl goes down into the dark basement and everybody but her knows she should turn and run."

"But if she did, the movie would end right there," agreed Holliday. "That's where we are," he went on. "We're at the place where the movie should just end, because if we had any brains we'd run to the cops."

"But we can't," said Peggy.

"What are you getting at?"

"Philpot's keeping the movie going." She paused. "And you can GPS us off that phone with the right equipment."

"So?" Holliday asked.

"Why is he doing it?" Peggy said. "He and Pesek's people save our bacon after they kidnapped us, and now he gets us passports. He wants us back in the middle of it all. Why?" She paused. "Is he setting us up like Brennan did?"

"That thought had crossed my mind," Holliday said abjectly. "But what are we supposed to do about it now?" He turned and looked at Peggy. "I should send you back to Rafi in Jerusalem."

"Don't be so retro, Doc. And besides, Rafi's not in Jerusalem; he's in Ethiopia or somewhere, looking for some lost Roman Legion or King Solomon's Mines or something. And, anyway, I wouldn't go. You need me." Peggy looked out the window, then back at Holliday. "So, what do we do now?"

"I might have one more card to play," Holliday said thoughtfully.

"It better be an ace," said Peggy.

Kate Sinclair was over the mid-Atlantic on her way back to the United States for her son's formal investiture as vice president when her companion's satellite phone pinged insistently. Excusing himself, Mike Harris took the call. He listened for less than a minute and then ended the call.

"Anything important?" Sinclair asked, smoking a cigarette and sipping a glass of her own red wine.

"Pyx reporting in as you requested. He's given everyone passports and Visa cards. The Visas have GPS locators under the hologram, just as he said. We can find them anytime we want."

"Good," said the old woman. "I always knew bribing that man was a good idea. Knowing who's looking for false IDs can be quite useful at times."

Holliday and Peggy picked up their passports at the Canadian Embassy in Paris, took a cab to Charles de Gaulle Airport and arrived in New York twenty-three hours after boarding the TGV in Lyon. Surprisingly, everything had gone without a hitch. The passport officer at the embassy gave them smiles as he handed them their phony passports, the cab driver to Charles de Gaulle talked about how much he had enjoyed a recent trip to New York to visit his married sister in Brooklyn, and the food on the Air France jumbo was terrific. The security people at JFK barely gave them a second look even though they didn't have any luggage, and they waved down a limo heading into the city on their first attempt. They booked two adjoining rooms at the newly refurbished Gramercy Park Hotel and by lunchtime they were in the Rose Bar, snacking on Kobe beef burgers with hand-cut fries and green tomatoes.

"So who exactly is Max Kessler?" Peggy asked, dipping a fry into a blob of ketchup. "And why are we going to see him?"

"He's kind of like a shadow Henry Kissinger," answered Holliday. "He was a geek before the word was invented. An information freak, a people collector, a scholar, a schmoozer. On top of that he's been a private counsel and intelligence adviser to the last four presidents."

"I've never heard of him." Peggy frowned. She popped the fry into her mouth and chewed appreciatively.

"That's the point," said Holliday. "He's like the phantom of the opera, always the behind-the-scenes guy."

"Why so secretive?"

"I think it has something to do with his father."

"Who was his father?"

"An SS Colonel, Rhinehard Gehlen's executive assistant."

"You lost me. Rhinehard who?"

"Gehlen. A Nazi spymaster in charge of their Soviet desk. He traded his information to the OSS in return for him and his family being brought to the States under Operation Paperclip. He worked for the CIA for decades. He went back to Germany and became head of West German Intelligence until the late seventies. Hugo Von Kessler stayed here along with his wife and his son. Max just carried on the family tradition. There are still whispers about Max's access to secret information but nobody really cares as long as he comes up with the goods."

"How do you know him?"

"We helped each other out a few times over the years," said Holliday vaguely. "The point is, Max Kessler knows everything and everybody when it comes to the CIA and anything to do with intelligence. If Philpot's playing us or Tritt is involved with some kind of plot he'll know about it."

Max Kessler occupied what had once been Boris Karloff's gloomy apartment on the sixth floor of the Dakota, overlooking Central Park. The building was famous for being the location used in Rosemary's Baby and the place where John Lennon was assassinated.

Kessler's apartment had a living room, a dining room converted into an office, two bedrooms and an enormous kitchen. There were an awful lot of dark wood paneling, crystal chandeliers and heavy Victorian furniture that was brought over from England by the container load and sold as "important antiques" during the fifties and sixties. There were doilies and dusty-looking Persian carpets everywhere and bad paintings of horses and battles from forgotten wars on expensively papered walls. It could have been the home of somebody's dowager aunt.

Kessler looked like an undertaker. He greeted them at the door, wearing a three-piece, dark blue pinstripe suit, a blue-and-gold Harvard Law silk tie and expensive-looking, tasseled shoes. He wore round horn-rims balanced on a long nose that mimicked his overlong chin. The cheeks were a little sunken, and his forehead arched up into thinning steel gray hair swept straight back in shiny Prussian perfection. The eyes behind the glasses were like lumps of coal, and when he smiled a greeting it looked as though the slight movement of his thin lips would crack his entire face like a boiled egg.

He led them into the small living room and gestured toward a sofa upholstered in black and yellow stripes that might have suited someone's grandmother. He lowered himself into a tall-backed armchair upholstered in the same fabric, tenting his fingers like an old-fashioned schoolmaster surveying a roomful of students. Peggy suddenly realized the role he was playing: it was a combination of Basil Rathbone and Jeremy Brett doing Sherlock Holmes. When he spoke he even had a faintly British accent, when by rights it should have been German.