Paul Christopher - The Templar throne

"Someone knows what we're researching?"

"Not someone. The Peseks. They got the kid because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, but someone hired them to kill us. We're the target."

"We have to tell the police."

"Not on your life, Sister. We'd be in the glue for days, maybe weeks if we call the cops. They generally follow the line of least resistance in an investigation, which means us. We've got to go back to the workstation, wipe it down for prints, then find a back way out of here and a taxi to the airport. When they find this kid it's going to hit the fan with a bang. I want us on a plane to London before nightfall."

They barely got out of the building undetected, let alone to the airport. Eventually Holliday and the nun found what must have been one of the original winding narrow stairways in a distant corner of the big rambling convent cloister. The dust on the worn stone steps had been recently disturbed. A woman wearing low- heeled shoes; Holliday could see the outline of the square heel and the pointed oval of the sole clearly in the dust. The shoe prints were coming and going. She'd left the way she'd come in.

Holliday could visualize it easily enough: a young man sees a good-looking woman where she really shouldn't be, but he doesn't get angry because her smile is so friendly. It wouldn't have taken her much to get close enough. They would have talked for a moment, standing over the ledger he'd pulled from the shelf.

Daniella Kay would have flirted with him mercilessly. She'd be good at that, hypnotic as a snake. The young man would have barely noticed her slipping the deadly plastic stickpin from her hair, and by then it would have been too late. He'd have died almost instantly, the stickpin skewering into his brain, his head full of the glorious fantasies of older women that only young men believe in.

Holliday and the nun reached the bottom of the narrow spiral staircase. It ended in a tiny dusty alcove and a door that had obviously been recently jimmied, the old wood around the latch splintered and white. Pushing out through the doorway, they found themselves in a small overgrown patch of garden between the wall of the cloister and the building next door.

"Which way?" Sister Meg asked.

To the left, through the trees, Holliday could see the end of one of the canal branches, or ramo. To the right a pathway led out to the plaza around the Church of San Rocco. Either way was dangerous; the water route meant they would be trapped in a motorboat being piloted by somebody else, and to go out through the San Rocco plaza meant crowds of people.

"This way," said Holliday, gripping Sister Meg by the arm and guiding her down the path toward the plaza. If the Peseks were waiting for them they'd have a better chance of escaping through a crowd. He frowned. On the other hand, if the alarm went up about the murdered archivist, the plazas of San Rocco and the Frari would be the first place the cops would look. He was fairly sure the guard on duty at the entrance to the archives would recognize them, and so would the girl with all the languages. "We have to get as far away as we can in the least amount of time."

They headed down the pathway through the high, broad plane trees and finally stepped onto the small plaza, the church the square was named for on their right along with the Scuola di San Rocco beside it, once a private religious fraternity and now a municipal building famous for its Tintoretto paintings. The rear of the looming brick Frari was on their left. The only way out lay directly ahead, straight across the plaza at the end of a narrow street, where a tour boat was loading passengers at the foot of a set of stone stairs.

"Head for the tour boat," said Holliday, craning his neck, checking the crowd on the plaza. There was an undeniable sense of imminent danger ringing alarm bells in his head; they were being watched. As they stepped out onto the neatly flagstoned campo Holliday reflexively looked upward, checking for open windows and rooftop sniper positions.

The escape route across the relatively small open space reminded Holliday of Matar Baghdad Al-Dawli, the Baghdad airport road, once an eight- lane boulevard processional route between luxury hotels and high-rises. The war had changed all that. Now it was a gauntlet to be run holding your breath and praying not to be blown to bits by an IED or turned into a target for someone in the shadows with a hate-on for Americans and a Russian-made RPG.

The danger there was to look too far down the road and lose your concentration. In Baghdad, death was always in the details, and Holliday had that same skin-crawling feeling now.

Five steps into the plaza the sky overhead opened and it began to rain, a sudden downpour that seemed to have caught everyone off guard. Holliday breathed a sigh of relief. Gripping Sister Meg's arm even tighter, he urged her forward, squinting through the deluge.

"Run!" Holliday hissed in her ear; the rain made a perfect excuse. He was careful to keep them close to groups of other tourists running for cover; if the Peseks were out there watching, he wanted to offer the smallest target.

They reached the far side of the campo drenched but unharmed and kept on going down the street to the canal. They were the last ones to board the canopy-covered tour boat. A plastic banner drooped from the canopy: "Brooklyn Italian-American Hospital Workers Auxiliary Annual Cruise."

"Biglietto, per favore," said a tired-looking man in a very old officer's cap with a gold anchor stitched into the crushed and stained peak.

"Uh, we left them at the hotel," muttered Holliday. "Albergo, hotel? Do you understand what I'm saying? Capisci quello che sto dicendo?"

The man in the sailor's cap shrugged. "Quarantasette euro," he said. "Per uno."

It took him a second but Holliday finally figured it out. Forty-seven euros each. He dug into his wallet and took out two fifty-euro notes. He handed them to the tired sailor.

"Tenere il resto," said Holliday, hoping he'd got it right.

The man looked down at the two bills, then up at Holliday.

"Grazie," the man grumbled sourly, clearly not impressed with what he perceived to be a measly tip. He wearily hauled in the little gangplank, slammed the boarding gate shut and blew a bosun's pipe within a foot of Holliday's ear. The shrill note was earsplitting. A few seconds later there was a rumbling cough from somewhere in the rear of the big bargelike party boat and they began to move ponderously away from the stone dock. The ticket taker in the sailor's cap sat down on a stool and lit a cigarette. He leaned back and stared at the striped canvas canopy a few feet above him. From the front of the tour boat somebody started talking incoherently into a bullhorn. Rain tapped on the canopy loudly. People milled around on the deck, chattering happily in the rain, sipping complimentary drinks with umbrellas and eating soggy canapes arranged on a table forward of where Holliday and the nun were standing.

"Where are we going?" Sister Meg asked.

"Away from here, that's all that counts," answered Holliday.

His sense of direction completely vanished as the boat lumbered through the sheeting rain along the narrow canal. The vessel was so wide it forced several soaking stripe-shirt gondoliers to give way, the slim, elegant vessels squeezing past them, rocking heavily in the tour boat's backwash. Holliday was fairly sure the flat-bottomed craft had no business being in such a narrow thoroughfare but he wasn't about to complain. There had been danger in the plaza of San Rocco, he was sure of it, and it was only luck that had saved them.

With half a lifetime spent in critical situations, Holliday knew a great deal about luck, good and bad, and either way it never lasted. The only thing you could be sure of was that the needle was always in motion; the trick was to know the difference between the upswing and the down. The Peseks were pros of the first order; if their contract included himself and the red-haired nun beside him, then the assassin couple would be relentless. The biggest problem was that his only sight of them had been a brief glimpse across a dark road in Le Suquet, a collection of narrow twisting streets in the old section of Cannes on the west side of the famous yacht basin. He vaguely remembered Antonin Pesek as a well-dressed man with a graying, neatly trimmed goatee and Daniella as a good- looking woman in her fifties with the slightly aristocratic strut of a woman who rode horses. He doubted that he'd recognize either one if they were standing right beside him.