Paul Christopher - The Templar throne

"It's Jean de Saint-Clair," said Holliday. "And that's a Jacob's Quadrant in his hand. The navigation instrument I told you about."

"Do you know the significance of the lion with the sword?" Sister Meg asked. "I couldn't figure it out, or the six monks around the well." She shrugged. "I even ran it through Google. There are lots of lions with swords but none that quite match up. The closest was the old imperial crest of Persia."

"I don't know about the well and the monks but a golden lion with a sword standing on water is the coat of arms of Venice," said Holliday. "It's also a quadrant on the coat of arms on the Zeno family crest, the ship-builders who leased the Templars most of their fleet during the Crusades. According to this I'd say your Juliana and Jean de Saint-Clair went to Venice together, probably to rent a ship."

They found a little terrace restaurant on the other side of the Jewish Quarter and sat at a shaded table out of the direct sunlight. The restaurant was called U Vltavy, probably because it was only a block from the river. They had an odd menu-part Mexican, part Austrian and part Czech. Sister Meg had gazpacho and some sort of pork dish with freshly ground horseradish, while Holliday settled on beef stroganoff with rice and some of the same horseradish. They ate in silence for a while, enjoying the summer warmth and watching the tourists go past.

For some reason he didn't quite understand, Holliday had always enjoyed Prague more than any other city in Europe, east or west, even during the Soviet era. The locals had a sense of humor and seemed innately curious about everyone and everything. They'd use any excuse to engage tourists in friendly conversation, and a favorite game on the subways was to trade language-a few words of Czech in exchange for a few words in English. There was even a television channel that showed nothing but English movies with Czech subtitles as a language teaching aid.

Perhaps it had something to do with a few thousand years of being the western end of the Silk Road. With a few rare exceptions the city had been remarkably tolerant and welcoming to people of all races. It came as no surprise to Holliday that the Czechs were the first to rise up against the Soviet regime in 1989.

Thinking about that year always brought a smile to his face. After seventy-odd years of Soviet hegemony and the Iron Curtain, it had all turned out to be smoke and mirrors. The vaunted power of the Soviet army with its thousands of tanks turned out to be invested in so many inert chunks of rusting, immobile steel, silent for want of enough gasoline to run them a hundred feet, let alone a thousand miles into the heart of NATO territory.

The guidance systems in half their intercontinental ballistic missiles were years out of date, the people of Moscow were running out of toilet paper and the armed forces hadn't been paid in a year. It was all a lie, and the United States' supposedly all-knowing intelligence community hadn't seen it coming. Not even close. It was just as much a crock as the Russians'. Apparently you certainly could fool all of the people all of the time.

"What are you smiling about?" Sister Meg asked, patting her lips with her napkin, her face pleasantly flushed by the fresh horseradish. His smile broadened; maybe that old paranoid story was true; maybe we never really did land astronauts on the moon; it was all a story cooked up on a back lot somewhere by Richard Nixon and his cronies.

"Things never work out the way people think," answered Holliday. "Reality gets in the way or something comes flying in from left field and upsets the applecart."

"Nice mixed metaphor," the nun said and smiled.

"There's an old Jewish saying-Man plans, God laughs."

"You're talking about the painting?" Sister Meg said.

"It changes everything. It proves that Saint-Clair really did have the Quadrant and Lucas Cranach thought it was important."

"There's nothing in the archives about the Blessed Juliana going to Venice; not a mention."

"Someone knew," said Holliday. "Cranach must have known or he wouldn't have painted them like that two hundred years after the fact."

"But how?" Sister Meg asked.

"It's not hard to figure out. Dig deeply enough into history and you can always find the degrees of separation between people. Cranach was a painter with a number of important patrons, including kings. Royalty during the Renaissance was a tight little group. Contemporaries boasted about their patronage. Cranach could have easily known a Venetian painter. Some of his early work looks a lot like Domenico Ghirlandaio, for instance. Maybe they shared stories looking for subject matter." Holliday shrugged. "Maybe one of Ghirlandaio's patrons was a member of the Zeno family. They were rich enough."

"So now you're an art expert?"

"Not really, but paintings were the Middle Ages equivalent of news footage or photographs. A lot of information about battles and tactics can be found on the walls of major art galleries."

"Do you have an answer for everything?"

Holliday sighed and put down his fork, his appetite gone.

"Only to snotty questions from arrogant nuns." He stared at her across the table. "You've been riding me since we met," he said. "Why? What did I do to you?"

"You've been patronizing me from the beginning," she answered.

"If that's true I certainly didn't do it on purpose," said Holliday.

"That doesn't make it any better."

"I've been teaching eighteen-year-old wet-behind-the-ears cadets for the last few years. Maybe that's why I seem patronizing. Before that I was ordering soldiers around."

"I'm not a cadet or a soldier and I'm not wet behind the ears or eighteen either."

Something caught Holliday's eye and he glanced over her shoulder.

"Don't look now but Cue Ball is back."

Sister Meg froze. She stared at Holliday, eyes wide.

"You're joking," she said coldly. "If this is a joke then all bets are off. We go our separate ways."

"No joke. He's leaning on a lamppost at the end of the block reading that stupid newspaper of his." Holliday shook his head. "He's going to get skin cancer on that chrome dome if he stays out in the sun without a hat the way he does."

"How did he find us?"

"He must have figured we'd head for the convent. He had to be waiting for us to come out and then followed us here."

"What should we do?"

"Why don't you decide," said Holliday. "I wouldn't want to sound patronizing or anything." He sat back in his chair and waited.

"Maybe we shouldn't do anything," she said. "He knows we'll eventually go back to the hotel."

"What if we don't?"

"Pardon."

"You have your passport on you?" Holliday asked.

"Always." She nodded, patting the plain canvas bag in her lap.

"Me too," said Holliday. "Anything you'll miss back at the hotel?"

"Just some clothes, a few toiletries. What are you suggesting?"

"Hang on," said Holliday. He took out his BlackBerry and thumbed the keys.

"What are you doing?" Sister Meg asked.

Holliday looked down at the little screen.

"There's a train to Vienna with connections to Venice leaving Praha hlavni nadrazi at five o'clock this afternoon. It gets into Venice at eight tomorrow morning. If we can give Cue Ball the slip until then we should be okay."

"We have to get out of here first."

Holliday casually twisted around in his chair.

"That's Listopadu Street up ahead, which means the Starenova Synagogue is a couple of blocks south of us," he muttered, trying to orient himself. "That means the restaurant has to back onto the top end of the Jewish Cemetery."

"So?"

"That's our way out."

Holliday dug into his wallet, pulled out a fifty-koruna note-coincidentally the one with a picture of Agnes of Bohemia on it-then dropped it on the table to cover their bill. He took out another koruna, this one an orange-brown two-hundred-crown note, worth about fifty dollars American. He stuck his wallet back into his pocket.