Paul Christopher - The Templar throne

13th December, 1314. Giorgio Zeno. Seen at Gibraltar, the Barca Santa Maria Maggiore, leased to Cavaliere Jean de St. Clair, en route from St. Michael's Mount.

"Do you think they mean Mont Saint-Michel?" Sister Meg asked, reading over Holliday's shoulder.

"Why would they translate the name into English? The notation is in Italian," said Holliday.

"So he stopped at St. Michael's Mount in Cornwall on their return?" Sister Meg said.

"Apparently," said Holliday. "It may have been a staging base for the outward leg as well."

"Why would that be the case?" Sister Meg asked. "Jean de Saint-Clair was French."

"What was France and what was England back then is a toss-up," explained Holliday. "Eleanor of Aquitaine didn't speak a word of English but she was the mother of Richard the Lionheart. Brittany and Aquitaine were both British possessions in France. He could have very well been English and with a previous alliance with Mount St. Michael rather than with Mont Saint-Michel. There's no way to know without going there."

"Then we don't need to see the next ledger," said Sister Meg.

"I'd like to see it anyway," said Holliday. "The closing entry might have some more information we could use."

They waited for almost a full hour but there was no sign of the young man.

"This is ridiculous," fumed Holliday.

"You sent him on a wild-goose chase and he knows it," said Sister Meg.

"Wild-goose chase or not, he should do his job," answered Holliday stubbornly. Another twenty-five minutes went by but still the young man was a no-show.

"Maybe we should just go," suggested Sister Meg.

"Not until I see that ledger," answered Holliday. "I paid to see it." He looked at his watch. It was past noon.

"There has to be another way out of here. Maybe he's gone to lunch," said Meg.

"Then I'll get the damned ledger myself," said Holliday. He fiddled with the computer, found the number he wanted again and jotted it down. He stood up and headed for the door leading back into the archive stacks. Sister Meg followed.

"Nobody's forcing you to come," said Holliday brusquely. "If I see the little punk I can wring his scrawny neck on my own."

"That's exactly why I'm tagging along," answered the nun.

"Suit yourself," said Holliday. He pulled open the door and stepped through. Sister Meg was right on his heels.

Beyond the doorway the long cloister was a labyrinth of floor-to-ceiling racks of documents and papers, some loose and some in slipcase binders. Other fonds were in boxes and crates, some plastic, some wood and some cardboard. The shelves themselves were made out of wood or steel and were of varying lengths, creating little alleyways through the stacks at intermittent points like dead ends in a garden maze.

There were also varying numbers of aisles, some abruptly ending, others looking as though they went on forever. There seemed to be no order to any of it-codes on one section of shelves appeared to be alphabetical, while the next set of shelves was divided numerically, or even by date or with some Italian version of the Dewey decimal system.

"This is nuts," said Holliday. "I used to think the British Library system was a nightmare-this is truly insane."

"It is confusing," agreed Sister Meg.

"It looks like there's elements from every era of the archives' existence, bits and pieces that were popular at the time. It's incoherent."

"Just like Italian politics, from what I understand," said Sister Meg.

"Don't go wandering off," cautioned Holliday. "It would be like getting lost down Alice in Wonderland's rabbit hole."

Sister Meg smiled at the reference.

" 'Oh my ears and whiskers, how late it's getting!' " quoted the nun.

"Pardon?" Holliday said.

"It's from Alice in Wonderland," she explained. "The White Rabbit who leads Alice down the rabbit hole."

"I never read it actually," confessed Holliday. "I saw it on my friends the Corbett twins' TV when I was seven or eight. They had the only TV in the neighborhood, color too; a twenty-one-inch RCA Aldrich model. Teddy loved Alice, Artie hated it. They were like that about everything. The only other thing I remember is the Jefferson Airplane song, 'Feed your head' and all that."

"You should be ashamed of yourself," chided Sister Meg. "It's a literary classic."

Holliday clasped his hands in front of himself, bowed his head and recited the entire Mea Culpa "apologia" in droning Latin.

"Impressive," said Sister Meg, "and in Latin no less." She paused. "Although it lacked something in the way of sincerity."

"I was an altar boy. Have you ever met an altar boy who enjoyed having the priest box his ears when he flubbed his lines?"

"Your experience with the Church wasn't the best, was it?"

"Nuns who whacked you, priests who whacked you and sometimes worse, various Popes who told you your genitalia would rot if you had premarital sex or masturbated, going to confession and having voyeuristic old men listen to your most private thoughts, and to top it all off, being forced to watch Bishop Sheen instead of Milton Berle on Tuesday nights at eight. Yeah, you might say my experience with the Church was pretty lousy."

"Nothing more anti-Church than a lapsed Catholic," sighed the nun.

"Being a lapsed Catholic has nothing to do with it," snorted Holliday. "I dislike any religion that believes it's the only true word of God. Catholic, Muslim, Jew and Evangelist alike." He shook his head. "This isn't the time for theological discussion. Let's find the little jerk and get out of here."

They found him in the N 24 stack under a sign hanging from the ceiling that read simply Navi-Ships. He was sitting on his knees in front of the bottom Z21 shelf looking down at a ledger he'd laid out on the floor, its slipcase neatly put to one side. The young man's glasses had slipped down onto his nose. If it weren't for the trickle of blood dripping steadily from his right ear down onto the ledger, everything would have looked quite normal.

Beside Holliday, Sister Meg made a gentle noise in the back of her throat. When she spoke there were tears in her voice.

"The poor boy!" she whispered quietly. "A cerebral hemorrhage?"

"A hatpin," answered Holliday, who'd seen a wound just like it once before. The ear that time had belonged to a gold smuggler named Valador. "Plastic, so it goes through airport metal detectors. She pushes it into the middle ear and then through the temporal bone to the brain via the internal auditory nerve canal." Holliday squatted down for a better look. "Apparently it takes a great deal of skill."

"She?" Sister Meg said.

"Her name is Daniella Kay, the Canadian spouse of a Czech assassin-for-hire named Antonin Pesek. They're a husband-and-wife team."

"The boy was murdered?"

Holliday pushed his hand into the open neck of the young man's shirt and pressed his palm against the bare skin over his heart. It was still warm to the touch. He withdrew his hand, forcing himself not to reach up and close the kid's staring, still bright eyes. The dulling and shrinking of the eyeballs hadn't even begun yet.

"Murdered, and not too long ago. Ten minutes, maybe fifteen."

Sister Meg stood there, stunned, staring at the kneeling corpse.

"Why would anyone want to kill an archive clerk?"

Holliday leaned forward and looked at the ledger on the floor. Blood had pooled into a sticky mass in the center of the page, staining the spidery handwriting on the facsimile, but it was still easy enough to see the ragged tear running down the spine.

"Someone's torn out a page," said Holliday. He pushed himself up.

"They killed him for a ledger entry?"

"It's about the third or fourth page in the next Zeno ledger," said Holliday. "It's almost certainly the entry for the return of the Santa Maria Maggiore to Venice."