Paul Christopher: The Templar conspiracy

Teeter looked out the half-frosted windshield. The parking lot in front of the big P amp;C supermarket. Almost closing time. Teeter picked up the simple little radio control that would detonate the bomb parked next to the side wall of the shopping center. He might be the odd man out, but he knew the stats.

He grinned. He could see the estimates and the comparisons in the newspapers. The Oklahoma City bomb had been three thousand pounds; this one was fifty thousand pounds. The Oklahoma City bombing created a thirty-foot-deep crater and took out half an office building, causing damage for blocks around. This one would vaporize the entire supermarket and half a dozen other stores in the shopping center.

He would get a cell phone call from Barfield. That was the signal to climb out of the truck with the detonator, press the switch and then run like hell. He'd have five minutes to get himself out of range and to the rendezvous on Pine Street. He checked his watch again. Twenty minutes. He turned up the Tina Turner cut on his iPod. Now there was an old bitch who could sing.

General Angus Scott Matoon sat in his E Ring office in the Pentagon and fretted. It was eight o'clock in the evening and so far there was no news from Winter Falls. That could mean nothing or anything, but if Crusader was to succeed he needed to take the men of Prairie operational, and soon. He had enough men in place to take over the small but vital command-and-control units of the nation's telecommunications satellites, but to gather the reins of that power into a single fist would take time. Crusader was a tightrope; America had to be briefly thrown into chaos before Vice President Sinclair came to the rescue. As well as being Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and Chief of Staff of the Army, Matoon also had personal command of the little-known and even less-documented USNORTHCOM, the United States North American Command-a million-member strong homeland defense force controlling the land, sea and air in and around the continental United States, Canada and Mexico, and essentially occupying both the United States and those two sovereign nations under an iron-fisted martial law that came from the Oval Office and the commander in chief. It had been quietly established just after 9/11 and further augmented during the economic crises of 2008 to 2010, with the fear of a banking collapse and the threat of a new civil war.

As soon as word came down that Crusader was in motion, Matoon's main job was to take over the euphemistically named Consequence Management Response Force, a massive, military-manned national police force from USNORTHCOM's headquarters at Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. None of this could be accomplished until he had control of the satellite systems and Rex Deus became the de facto leadership of the nation. He looked at his watch. He couldn't wait any longer. He picked up the red telephone in front of him on the big oak desk that had once belonged to General Robert E. Lee and punched in a number.

"We have a prairie fire."

Everything went off like clockwork. The chopper landed square in the center of the big canvas target that had been pegged out on the snow-covered grass of the little park in front of the Municipal Building on Croppley Street. The smiling president, bounding down the short steps, shook hands with Mayor Dotty Blanchette, and together, before they froze to death, they got into the middle Escalade in the nine-car procession and headed for the Abbey School.

The Abbey School rink, named for the president's late father, was located on the foundations of what had once been the main animal pen for the Abbey's cheese-producing sheep and that had later been converted into what had been pretentiously referred to as the Big End- the main cricket field for the school. Cricket had gone over like a lead balloon and the large area to the east of the main school building had been converted into a baseball diamond. With New Hampshire regularly having as much as five months of winter, hosing down the baseball field in late October or early November and turning it into a skating rink seemed like a natural thing to do, and with the prez's prowess at hammering his opponents blindsided into the boards and making power plays, covering the rink and putting in seating followed equally naturally.

Previously the classic game between Winter Falls High and the Abbey School had taken place on the schoolyard rink at the latter, but that meant the game had to be played in daylight and attendance was usually pretty low. With the covered rink at the Abbey the game changed dramatically; there were cheerleading squads for both schools-all-male for the Abbey, all-female for Winter Falls-and with seating for 2,500 you could get half the population of the town and the faculties and student bodies from both schools into the building.

Marching bands played, programs and hot dogs were sold to raise money for the two schools' favorite charities-in the case of the Abbey School this meant sending twenty dollars a month to a child of indeterminate sex named Sui Sang in Hong Kong, and in the case of Winter Falls High it was twenty dollars a month to the Salvation Army.

The whole thing had the nice, American ring of sportsmanship and charity about it, and in its own way the dropping of the puck ceremony developed its own cachet, like being made a Hasty Pudding Man or Woman of the Year at Harvard University. Celebrities of both real and dubious distinction had been given the invitation, from Dick Cheney and Wayne Gretsky to Pee-wee Herman and Howie Mandel. To drop the puck at the Abbey-Winter Falls game was a hot photo op, especially when the New York Times was doing a magazine cover story on you timed to coincide with the announcement of your political autobiography, Promises, Promises, which the prez knew he was going to have to write sooner or later.

The ride to the old gray wall surrounding the Abbey School took less than ten minutes, even at motorcade speed-more than enough time for Morrie to inquire about the whereabouts of the luscious Shannon O'Doyle, who, Dotty was sad to inform him, had died of breast cancer almost ten years gone by.

They drove through the main gates, manned by two patrol cars with their flashers going just to show people how serious they were, then drove around the long, curving driveway past the main building and the old cloisters to the rink, a glass-and-steel flying wedge that had nothing to do with the nineteenth-century, gothic pile of the dark, gloomy school.

Another three minutes and Dotty, Morrie and the president were being escorted to their center-ice seats by two Eagle Scouts, one from the Abbey and one from the high school. Flashes flashed, the PA system boomed and the two teams were introduced and lined up on the ice to shake hands with the man who held the throttle of the world. At seven fifteen the festivities began. Forty-five minutes of high school bands and stupid speeches and the puck would drop.

No one noticed the big Sunoco heating oil truck parked beside the main building, a man in a Sunoco uniform with a nozzled hose in his hand in front of an ordinary-looking standpipe. No one, it seemed, realized that if any truck should be parked beside the school that night it should have been a big green Hess Natural Gas truck, not a big, yellow Sunoco fuel oil tanker.

Kate Sinclair's Gulfstream landed at Manassas Regional Airport and taxied toward the cluster of 1930s-style buildings that marked the terminal area. Just as the pilot cut the engines to a dull throb, Mike Harris's satellite phone pinged again. He took the call, a slow grin wreathing his features.

"What?" Sinclair asked, irritation in her voice; she hated when other people knew things she didn't.

"According to the GPS, they're in Winter Falls."

"Put out an APB or whatever it's called. Have them picked up," said Sinclair. Her smoky breath rattled in her throat and she felt her heart swell with expectation.