Paul Christopher: The Templar conspiracy

Billy Tritt sat in his room in the inn and tried to control his anger. The first explosion had gone off perfectly, sending Malcolm Teeter to whatever hell awaited his shriveled, mindless soul.

Windows had blown out in half of Winter Falls, there was panic everywhere and a huge fire was developing on the eastern edge of town. It had been distraction enough to draw the fire trucks out of their hall on the west side of the Municipal Building and from the looks of it from his position, part of the roof of the police department had collapsed. With the cessation of communication resulting from the triple threat of the destruction of the electrical substation, the telephone switching hub and the two cell towers serving Winter Falls, both the Headquarters Emergency Management unit of the New Hampshire State Police in Concord and the F Troop station in Twin Mountains would have automatically been alerted, but F Troop was sixty miles away and Concord ever farther. At the very least it would take F Troop the better part of an hour to appear and the HQ SWAT team about half an hour longer.

However, the second truck bomb at the Abbey School had not detonated for some reason and Tritt had been forced to go to his Plan B alternative. The second bomb should have demolished the main building of the school, the stone debris in turn destroying the relatively flimsy construction of the arched shell enclosing the hockey rink. By now Tritt should have been halfway across Lake Winnipesaukee, riding on the snowmobile he'd left behind Gorman's Restaurant earlier in the evening.

Reaching the other side of the lake and his rental car, Tritt would have detonated the other four truck bombs spread around the town via satellite phone, and while Winter Falls burned he'd be climbing aboard the little Cessna he'd chartered at Laconia Airport and heading into oblivion once more.

Instead he was on the third floor of an old brick bed-and-breakfast in a snowstorm, awaiting the inevitable arrival of the president and his retinue. It would make his own exfiltration considerably more dangerous, but he'd contracted for the president's death and, if nothing else, he always fulfilled his contracts.

Tritt shifted slightly in his chair beside the window. They'd be coming from the west and they'd be coming fast, lights flashing and sirens wailing. The security they used for once-upon-a-time presidents was definitely second-tier-new Secret Service types as well as old burnouts-but it was enough to give him trouble. There'd be a few local cops and a squad of state police from the VIP protection bunch, but that would be about it.

They'd all heave a sigh of relief once the chopper rose into the snowy air, and that's when he would strike. He reached over and laid his hand on the tube of the ATC Confined Space Anti-Tank weapon. Unlike the weapon he'd used in Italy, the ATC was unguided, but from his window the chopper was no more than 150 meters away. He could hardly miss. The two-kilo, high-explosive warhead would turn the VIP helicopter into scrap metal in a split second.

He had timed it roughly and it would take him about thirty seconds to get out through the main-floor kitchen of the hotel and another minute to reach Gorman's Restaurant and the dock that ran out to the ice beside it. It was really the only way out.

Whatever was left of the Maine's Right Arm bunch he'd brought with him were to escape by road, but if the state police were any good at all they'd have expanding perimeter roadblocks established very quickly, especially with a President of the United States involved, soon-to-be-ex or otherwise.

If the MRA types were dumb enough they'd try to shoot their way out, which would mean even more fuel to Matoon and the Sinclair bitch's fire. The whole plan was insane, of course, but so was Hitler, and it didn't matter, anyway, since they paid well. He could and would retire on what they were paying him for this night's work.

He heard the sirens now, approaching fast. He parted the curtains slightly and opened the old-fashioned casement window. He picked up the antitank weapon from the side table on his left, balanced it on his right shoulder and used the index finger of his right hand to disengage the two safeties. He moved the index finger from the safety switches on the side of the tube and laid it firmly on the firing button that was located just in front of the optical night sight. He waited and for a moment he let himself see the clear Caribbean blue of the water just offshore from his place at Lyford Cay. He slowly let the air out of his lungs, imagining himself snorkeling above a school of darting spotted drums. Below him the motorcade came into view. They were here and it was time to end it.

"Shit," said Randy Lockwood. Out of the whirling snow he could see the lead car of the motorcade, light bar flashing, the sound of its siren muffled by the storm. If Tritt was nearby they had no more than a few seconds to find him. Behind the Winter Falls cruiser he could see the trailing line of Escalades, one of them with the president inside. He gritted his teeth and prayed that this man Holliday was wrong.

As a rule the average person rarely looks higher than the horizon directly in front of him. This is a natural instinct bred into the human race for millions of years, since man's predators almost inevitably approached him on the same level, whether from the front or the rear. It is also the first instinct to disappear very quickly among military personnel and even civilians in places like Iraq and Afghanistan; like the unofficial motto of the Eighty-second Airborne in Vietnam, death very often came from above.

Holliday knew that if Tritt was nearby he'd go for the high ground. The square in front of the Municipal Building had two-story, Victorian-era buildings on the east side and the same on the west, with the Municipal Building forming the northern side of the square. The south, or Main Street side, was taken up by the Dominion Hotel, a squat, seven-story, flat-roofed brick building that looked down onto the park that formed the center of the square.

As the motorcade swept around the eastern side of the square Holliday looked up. At first nothing seemed out of place. The Dominion Hotel, like every other building in Winter Falls, was dark.

"Anything?" Lockwood said.

"No," said Holliday, squinting through the heavy snowfall. The motorcade was pulling up in front of the Municipal Building.

"There!" said Peggy, pointing.

"What?"

"Third floor, fourth from the left. The window's open! Who the hell would have a window open on a night like this?"

Holliday stared upward, following her pointing finger. He caught a flutter of movement as the wind billowed the curtains. It was Kandahar, before he'd lost his eye. A fluttering window and a shadow with a cell phone. The Humvee stopped just in front of the IED before it exploded and the.50-caliber machine gun on the vehicle shredded the window frame around the twitching curtain and the shadowy figure behind it. He didn't hesitate and neither did Lockwood. They fired simultaneously just as Tritt's finger pushed down on the firing button of the antitank rocket.

The world exploded all around them. A flame trail from the rocket arced down from the hotel window, catching the Super Puma helicopter squarely between the sliding door and the slightly sagging multiple rotors, striking the big twin Turbomeca engines and rupturing the fuel lines. For a fraction of a second there was silence and it seemed as though little or no damage had been done. Then the explosive warhead of the rocket detonated and the entire helicopter was enveloped in a growing fireball. The blast wave knocked Holliday, Peggy and Lockwood to the ground as fractured pieces of rotor spun off in all directions, one piece slicing through the front entrance of Uncle Jimmy's Sport Paradise, while a second, larger piece sawed through the middle of the lead police cruiser in the motorcade, instantly killing both the driver and his partner.