Paul Christopher - The Templar conspiracy

Now, with his presidential library being built in San Diego, his $200,000-a-year pension, travel budget, office expenses, a decade's worth of Secret Service protection and top-of-the-line health insurance coming out of the taxpayer's pocket all ready to go and waiting for him at the end of his term in a year and a half, it only seemed right to cap it all off with a visit to the Abbey.

The President of the United States thought about that while seated in the luxuriously appointed passenger's compartment of Marine One as it droned across the late-afternoon Vermont sky on its way to Winter Falls. Beside him, Morrie was going over the most recent intelligence reports on the jihad slayings, trying to make sense of it all and coming up empty. Below them the snow-mantled forest stretched to the horizon. Morrie lit a Cohiba, took a deep drag and leaned back in the butter-soft leather armchair, a cut-crystal glass of 107-proof Pappy Van Winkle's Family Reserve on the rocks in the holder by his right hand.

"You think Shannon O'Doyle will be at the game?" Morrie asked wistfully.

"The Snow Queen?" The president laughed. Shannon O'Doyle had been the sexual fantasy of every boy at the Abbey and at Winter Falls High. Naturally ash blond and shy, her nylons made that terribly erotic whispering sound when she crossed her legs. "She's probably a gray-haired old lady by now."

"So what?" Morrie replied. "Some dreams go on forever." He smiled around the fat Cuban cigar. Those really were the good old days. "And, anyway, we're gray-haired old men."

The president sighed. Why was it that it took so long to get where you were going but the time spent after arriving was so brief? It was the one real problem with the American Dream: inevitably you woke up. The helicopter rumbled onward over the trees and the president stared out the window, thinking about Shannon O'Doyle's nylons and the shivering, dangerous sound of skates rushing on ice.

"What are the odds this Kessler guy is right?" Peggy asked. They were sitting in the back booth at Gorman's, overlooking the dock and the flat, bright white of the lake ice, turning gold now with the fading light of the winter sun. The iceboats were drawn up in a row, their sails furled, the roaring wind off the lake sending up a strange, cicadalike hum through their taut rigging.

Holliday sipped his coffee and stared out the window at the bleak, frozen scene. In the summer the docks and the lake probably looked about their best at this time of day. "Pretty good," he said, feeling as bleak as the frigid scenery. "He seemed pretty convincing."

"He sounded convincing in his living room at the Dakota in New York," said Peggy. "Reality is a little different." She lifted her shoulders. "It could just be coincidence. There's nothing going on here, I swear."

"Kessler doesn't believe in coincidence any more than I do," answered Holliday. "He believes in synchronicity." He put down the coffee and began to tick off points on his fingers. "A president is coming to visit. Conveniently assigned to the event is Mike Harris, who's also a direct relation of Kate Sinclair. The timing is right-these days it's a short news cycle, and our new, distinguished vice president, Richard Pierce Sinclair, is soon to go off the radar. Winter Falls was voted the safest place in America, which makes it a perfect target. Easy to crack and shocking to see destroyed. If Sinclair and Rex Deus want to make a statement, this is the moment and this is the place."

"And if we're wrong?"

"Then we're wrong and we look somewhere else. Nothing wasted."

"Except time," muttered Peggy. "Time we could have spent elsewhere."

"JFK said something about assassination: 'If anyone is crazy enough to want to kill a president of the United States, he can do it. All he must be prepared to do is give his life for the president's.'"

"What's your point?"

"This country has spent a trillion dollars on antiterrorism since 9/11 and yet we couldn't stop a guy with a bomb in his crotch on a flight to Detroit. You just have to do your best. Nobody appointed us the president's saviors; that's what the damned Secret Service is for."

"And what if Kate Sinclair and Rex Deus have infiltrated the Secret Service? It's not impossible, you know. She seems to have wormed her way into everything else in Washington. Why not the Presidential Detail?"

"Does that make it our responsibility?" Holliday said.

"Officially, no. Morally, maybe."

"I'm not the nation's moral arbiter," said Holliday, a note of bitterness in his voice.

"Maybe you should be," said Peggy. "We certainly need one. And even a voice in the wilderness eventually gets heard."

"Kessler's given us a bit of an edge-believe me, Peg, he knows more than he's telling. Max Kessler's manipulated his way through every administration since Reagan. He wants us to be here. He knows something's going to happen in Winter Falls tonight and he's hoping we can stop it."

"How? What are we looking for?"

"Tritt. He'll be here somewhere-I guarantee it. And this time it won't be just an assassination. If Kessler's right he'll amp it up. Kate Sinclair needs something big enough to trigger Matoon and all the rest of it."

"I think we're both nuts. I feel like I'm in the middle of one of those conspiracy theories you read about on the Internet," said Peggy. "It's like… this can't be real and we can't be in the middle of it. Why us? A couple of ordinary people in the middle of a military coup, here, in the United States? It's crazy."

"Tell that to John Wilkes Booth," said Holliday. "He was a second-rate actor who changed the course of American history when he assassinated Abraham Lincoln. Adolf Hitler was a failed artist and a lowly corporal in World War One, but he was eventually the driving force behind the death of fifty million people. Sometimes the conspiracy theorists are right, kiddo." Holliday glanced at his watch. Two more hours to the face-off. They were running out of time. Holliday touched Peggy on the arm. "Come on," he said quietly. "Time we were on our way."

Chief Randy Lockwood sat in his small office in the Municipal Building, hemmed in by the three mongooselike agents who'd been glued to him since eight o'clock that morning. Dotty had told him to wear the dress uniform out of respect for the president, but he felt a little ridiculous. Besides the fact that typically it only came out for cop funerals in other towns, it also happened to be freezing cold outside and beginning to snow, and the wind blew through every stupid brass buttonhole. If that weren't enough to make him extremely uncomfortable, he found all the medals and citation bars a little embarrassing.

Only one of the agents, Special Agent in Charge Saxby, spoke to him. The other two were apparently there to watch Saxby, or maybe even Lockwood himself; he still wasn't sure. "It's all unnecessary," snapped Saxby. "Someone should talk to them."

"I didn't have anything to do with it," said Lockwood. "The headmaster at the Abbey School suggested it to the principal at the high school and they extended the invitation jointly to the president."

"Nobody checked with us, no one checked with Homeland and no one said a word to the Secret Service," Saxby grumbled. "The stupid son of a bitch drops a puck and the operation costs the taxpayers over a million dollars and takes us away from what we should be doing, which is tracking terrorists, not escorting lame ducks on junkets into the damned bush."

"Don't blame me," said Lockwood. "I didn't vote for him."

"After the attack in Virginia the current threat level is Orange. You know what that means?"

"Sure," said Lockwood dryly. "It's like ordering a Venti White Chocolate Mocha Frappuccino at Starbucks. Defcon One and Broken Arrow and Bent Spear and all that James Bond-coded bull puckie terminology you guys throw around. It's a big deal, right?"