Paul Christopher - The Templar throne

"But why?" Brennan insisted. "He and the woman are looking for a box of relics that probably don't even exist." The priest eyed his superior. "Besides which the Church forbids the worship of such things. The twenty-fifth session of the Council of Trent, I believe. As are the purchase or sale of such relics."

"Don't presume to teach me about Church dogma, Father Brennan," the cardinal said coolly.

"Then tell me why we're interested in this so-called True Ark or whatever it is."

"A relic is as a relic does, Father Brennan," said the cardinal obscurely.

Brennan frowned. "You'll have to explain that, I'm afraid," said the priest.

"The True Ark is said to contain the Holy Grail, the Crown of Thorns, the Holy Shroud, and the Ring of Christ."

"The fecking jackpot then," snorted Brennan.

"Nevertheless," said Spada.

"You can't believe it's true," said Brennan, astounded.

"It doesn't matter what I believe, Father Brennan," the cardinal answered. "Perception is everything. It's like the story of the emperor's new clothes: if enough people say the emperor is wearing silk, then he might just as well be wearing silk. If enough people say Paris Hilton is beautiful, then she is beautiful-even though it's patently untrue. She's far too skinny, she's flatchested, her nose is too large and her ankles too small." The secretary of state paused. "Whatever they find, we must have. That rag in the cathedral in Turin has been scientifically proven to be a fraud, but that doesn't stop tens of thousands coming to see it."

"If they find anything," grumbled Brennan. He butted his cigarette in the ashtray and lit another. Cardinal Spada let out a long-suffering sigh. He was tired of discussion. Why didn't Brennan just do as he was told?

"The best way to guarantee that they find nothing is to stop them looking," the cardinal said. "Besides that, if what you told me earlier is true, then this man Holliday has been entrusted with the true secret of the Templars-the numbers for their bank accounts. A bonus, although the money rightfully belongs to the Church, anyway."

"If we do this thing we can't have this coming back on us," warned Brennan.

"I understand that," Cardinal Spada said and nodded. "Hire outside help if you wish." The man in the scarlet skullcap stared across the desk. "Holliday is important, but remember who the woman is, as well."

"They're in Prague. I know just the people."

"Then get on with it," said Spada.

It was a dismissal.

Brennan left Spada's office and went down two flights of marble stairs to his own, much smaller office on the second floor. It was a plain square room with bare wooden floors, a metal desk, some black metal filing cabinets and a plain cross on the wall.

The only other decoration was a photograph of his long-dead sister Mary, a Magdalene nun, standing in front of St. Finnbar's in Cork City, smiling into the camera, squinting in the sunlight. The picture was from the late sixties, faded to sepia.

She'd worked as a supervisor of the indentured girls at the Magdalene Laundry on Blarney Street, above the North Mall and the River Lee with its famous swans. She'd so loved to feed the swans. She'd imagined they were the souls and spirits of ugly girls come back to the world as something beautiful. She'd died of some terrible respiratory sickness a year after the photo was taken, coughing her lungs out and praying to a heedless god.

The priest sat down at his desk, flipped through his old-fashioned Rolodex and came up with a number with a 420 prefix. He dialed and almost immediately the Vatican switchboard broke into the call. He gave the male operator the number, and then a name. There was a pause and then the double tone of the call ringing through in Prague. The phone rang three times and then was answered.

"Prosim?" The voice was a slightly phlegmy baritone.

"Pan Pesek? Antonin Pesek?"

"I am Pesek," said the voice. "Who are you?"

"This is Romulus," said Brennan, staring blankly at the photograph of his sister as he ordered the killing. "I have a job for you."

The Convent of St. Agnes of Bohemia is located on Milosrdnych Street in the Josefov, or Jewish Quarter, of Prague, the eleventh-century center of the original city that had grown on the banks of the Vltava River a thousand years before. The convent, now part of the National Gallery of Prague, was a collection of meticulously refurbished fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Gothic buildings centered around the old vaulted cloisters that now contain one of the finest collections of Baroque and Renaissance art in the world.

Holliday and Sister Meg got off the Metro at the Namesti Republiky stop and climbed up into the sunlight. The square was crowded with tourists and local shoppers, and there was a festive feeling in the air. People were eating cotton candy and popcorn as they strolled along, talking and laughing. Uniformed cops walked in pairs, doing as much window-shopping as the people around them. There was a line out the door at McDonald's.

Holliday and the nun walked north up Avenue Revolucni, a wide thoroughfare noisy with rumbling street-cars and lined with shops of all kinds, interspersed with ATMs every hundred yards or so just to make sure you had lots of Czech crowns in your pocket.

They turned west a block short of the river and took a shortcut through a government building parking lot to Rasnovka Alley, a narrow cobbled lane that led them down to the main entrance to the old convent. They paid their hundred and fifty koruna, roughly six dollars, and went into the thousand-year-old building.

The cloisters that made up the gallery were almost empty, and except for an old man dozing on a bench and a young couple more interested in each other's anatomy than the paintings on the wall, Holliday and Sister Meg had the place to themselves.

"I came for the archives, not the art," said Holliday. "Shouldn't we be next door at the monastery?"

"There's something here I wanted to show you," said the nun, eager excitement in her voice. "Something I remembered last night." After their escape from their bald pursuer Holliday was willing to indulge her. The paintings, the religious statuary and the extraordinary carved wooden altarpieces were certainly worth looking at, even if they had nothing to do with their objective.

They went up a narrow set of steps to the upper floor of the cloisters and down a long arched hall. Meg led Holliday to a large gilt-framed painting hanging on the plain, off-white plaster wall.

A man in armor stood on the left, a veiled woman on his left wearing a cowl on her head, throwing her face into shadow, a long black gown obscuring her figure. The man was wearing a full-length chain mail hauberk that came down to his ankles. He had a long sword sheathed at his waist and an overshirt with the familiar Saint-Clair engrailed cross coat of arms, while his shield bore the red Maltese cross of the Templar order.

The knight was holding what appeared to be a wooden engrailed cross in his free hand. Behind the two figures was a heraldic portrayal of a winged gold lion with a sword held in its right front paw and standing on a rippling blue field of water. In one corner, like the illustration from an ancient tarot card, six monks in their white habits prayed as they stood around a well. In the opposite corner of the painting was a stamped symbol of a heart with a cross in it.

Sister Meg read the description of the painting on a small plinth next to it. "The Blessed Juliana With Her Protector, painted by Lucas Cranach the Elder, 1427." She stared up at the near life-sized figure of the woman in the painting. "She always appeared veiled so men wouldn't be distracted by her great beauty," said Sister Meg, awe clear in her voice. She turned to Holliday. "Does her protector remind you of anyone?"