Paul Christopher - The Templar conspiracy

"It has been some time, Colonel. I was rather surprised by your telephone call." He smiled thinly. "Presumably it is a matter of some urgency."

"That remains to be seen."

"Before we begin, there is the matter of the telephone given to you by our mutual acquaintance Mr. Philpot."

"I took out the SIM card and the battery." Holliday said.

"A wise precaution. The use of GPS transponders in most telephones these days is a matter of some concern to me. It seems faintly Orwellian. A bit too 1984 for my tastes."

"What's your take on Philpot?" Holliday asked, getting to the point.

"He could easily be playing both sides."

"But both sides of what?" Peggy asked.

"You were involved in that affair with Rex Deus and the Sinclair woman some time back, were you not, Colonel?"

"I didn't think it was common knowledge," answered Holliday, surprised.

"Common knowledge isn't my stock-in-trade," said Kessler, his voice dry.

"What about Sinclair?" Holliday said.

"A murdered Pope. A priest and his male lover found dead on a back road in suburban Virginia. Two dead Blackhawk Security operatives in an apparent fatal automobile accident in Rock Creek Park, but with a dozen bullet holes in the remains of the immolated vehicle. An assassinated vice president. A national warrant for your arrest in Italy; an incident at the Canadian border involving a man and woman who match your descriptions. An assassination attempt by an unknown terrorist group on a United States senator, a murdered photographer burned to death in his new Porsche, and finally a federal warrant here, which begs the question of how you returned to the United States without alerting the authorities. You and Ms. Blackstock have cut quite a swath in the past week, Colonel."

"You left out the part about being kidnapped and flown to an American black site in the Czech Republic," said Peggy.

"Ah yes, the melodramatic rescue by Pane Pesek and his little ninja crew. I didn't think it was worth mentioning."

"Easy for you to say," snorted Peggy.

"I am a spider in a web, Ms. Blackstock. I stay in my little lair and morsels of information eventually make their way to me. Sometimes the morsels add up to a tasty meal; sometimes they do not."

"And in this case?" Holliday asked.

"In this case they add up to Kate Sinclair, which in turn leads us to her Rex Deus compatriot in the Central Intelligence Agency."

"And who might that be?"

"Michael P. Harris, deputy director of operations. The P stands for Pierce. He's Kate Sinclair's brother. As I said, crumbs of fact that sometimes go unnoticed."

"That could explain a great deal," murmured Holliday, trying to piece it together.

"Or nothing at all," replied Kessler. He smiled. "In this case, however, it explains almost everything."

"Do tell," said Peggy.

"By this time, at least according to Mr. Philpot, you are aware of Madame Sinclair's ambitions for her son, and thus for a Rex Deus hegemony in the United States. But Kate Sinclair needs more leverage. Having her son receive a flesh wound from a so-called terrorist and playing second lead in the White House isn't good enough to push her agenda over the top. I would suggest that she needs a bigger bang, and she needs it to come soon."

"Who, what, where and when?" Holliday said. "Those are the missing crumbs, as you call them."

"The who is simple," said Kessler. "Kate Sinclair can do nothing on her own and neither can her son-not that he has the sense. No. The who is definitely Mr. Harris. As to the rest-look for an event or a person, a time or a place where havoc would reap the most benefit. And look for it soon. Time is of the essence. It must come before our new vice president leaves the news cycle. Put Mr. Harris in such a place at such a time and you will have your answer."

"Any ideas?" Holliday asked.

"One or two," said Kessler, smiling thinly.

The Abbey School in Winter Falls predated the entire concept of tourism, and had been established in the early 1800s by a group of monks fleeing from the charred remains of what had once been the Petit Clairvaux Abbey in France. Over the previous centuries Petit Clairvaux had been ravaged by everything from plague and murderous kings to the destruction of the Templar Order, Napoleon Bonaparte's distaste for the monastic life and organized religion in general, and finally by fire.

The twelve remaining monks set sail for the new world, found an out-of-the-way spot in the forests of New Hampshire and settled down to a contemplative life and the making of cheese from sheep's milk.

Unfortunately the rich, smoky cheese they produced proved to be unpopular, and by the early 1900s St. Joseph's Abbey transformed itself into a tuberculosis sanitarium and survived as such until most of the monks and their patients died during the deadly second wave of the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918.

In 1920 the Abbey transformed itself once again and became the Abbey School, a Catholic boarding school with the explicit mandate to produce priests and monks who would extend the Benedictine creed in America. That didn't work any better than the sheep's milk cheese, and in 1930, as Winter Falls itself became a popular summer retreat for the rich and powerful, the Abbey School, by now a sprawling compound of hundred-year-old buildings and more modern structures, opened its doors to the children of anyone with the means to pay the hefty tuition and boarding fees, regardless of race, creed or color-with the exception of members of the Negro race, the Chinese and above all members of the Jewish faith. It was, in fact, relentlessly male, white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant for the next half a century.

During those fifty years the Abbey School attained a certain level of prominence as a prep school where A-list celebrities, politicians and the superwealthy of nations around the world sent their not-quite-A-list sons. The school had a number of advantages: it stressed sports-or games, as the school called them-rather than academics; it was in out-of-the-way New Hampshire, which meant it was both difficult for the school's privileged students to get into too much trouble with drugs, sex or alcohol, and it was distant enough to provide an excuse for parents not visiting except under the most extreme circumstances.

By the sixties there was regular limo service from New York and Boston and there was floatplane service from both those cities for parents who couldn't wait to see their sons ensconced behind the mossy granite wall that surrounded the old monastic compound.

It was the perfect spot to send a World War Two naval hero and retired admiral's son with a relentlessly B-plus average and utterly average SAT scores whose father wanted him to become president. Likable, handsome and with a great smile, but basically just an ordinary guy with a good haircut and great hockey skills.

Hockey was the only thing he'd ever excelled at, beyond being heir to a billion-dollar oil fortune on his mother's side. The game was, in the end, the real reason for his attendance at this fortieth reunion. More than his eventual graduation from the Abbey and his nudge-and-a-wink entrance into Yale, it had been his win over the Winter Falls Wolves as captain of the Abbey Argonauts and the winning of the coveted St. Joseph's Cup that had been the proudest moment of his pre-presidential life. As Morrie Adler had once put it in a Charlie Rose interview, "It gave him the green light for the rest of his life."

In his heart of hearts he'd known it was the single thing that finally spurred him on to success; if he could win that game he could win anything. It was one of his biggest benders, too, as he got bombed out of his gourd on the foul crabapple moonshine Morrie Adler made in his hidden basement still, and compounded by Lucky Strikes rolled in Polaroid film emulsion, a dimethyltryptamine, acidlike high discovered by his cousin, Mickey Haines.