Paul Christopher - The Templar throne

"Mrs. Pesek is going to be pissed," said Holliday.

"I believe you're right," said the nun.

Cornwall is the dangling foot of England, toes tentatively dipping into the English Channel at Land's End and the Lizard. It has always been a place apart, a place of lonely moors, strange sights and fog, the birthplace of mythic kings, druids and magicians. The language is secretive and musical and history is its stock in trade. Once it was a land of wrecking beaches on its cruel black coast and mines cutting deeply into the rock and peat, the miners looking for precious tin and silver.

It was Meg's turn at the wheel of the Peugeot rental. They'd left the airport hotel at Heathrow shortly after breakfast. It was noon now and they still had a hundred miles or so to reach their destination. They were roughly in the center of Dartmoor, just past the village of Two Bridges. In the distance the sky was a dark mass of roiling clouds the color of tarnished silver. The first few drops of rain were already spattering the windshield.

Holliday sat in the passenger seat beside the young woman, staring out the window at the dreary, almost sinister landscape. This was the Dartmoor of Her Majesty's Prison and Conan Doyle's infamous Hound of the Baskervilles. It was a long way from Venice.

Their escape had been utterly anticlimactic. They'd taken the homemade cabin cruiser across the muddy shallows at the airport end of the lagoon, finding a twisting path through the marsh, glad of the plywood's springy flat bottom. Eventually they ran the boat up on the beach and Holliday stuffed Pesek's body into the makeshift forward cabin. It was already a warm day and the little cabin was even hotter. The assassin's body would be a maggot-infested, bloated carcass within a day; if they were lucky nobody would find him until much later, at which point the body would be much more difficult to identify. As a precaution he'd taken the man's wallet, passport, and inscribed gold Patek Philippe watch and tossed them all overboard.

With the body hidden, Holliday and Sister Meg clambered off the boat and walked a quarter mile across a few farmers' fields to the village of Campalto on the main road to the airport. There they bought toiletries and fresh clothes, putting their purchases in a pair of old Alitalia flight bags they found in a thrift store.

From there they continued down the Via Orlando, the village's main street, had some lunch in the hotel dining room, then caught a cab and went on to the airport, less than five minutes away. At three in the afternoon they were on a British Midlands flight to Heathrow, and an hour after that they were crossing the big glass-and-steel atrium of the Heathrow Hilton. Everything had gone without a hitch.

"What I don't understand is why," Holliday said finally, looking out at the blurry countryside; the rain was coming down hard now, the wipers thumping back and forth rhythmically.

"Pardon?" Meg asked, concentrating on the narrow two-lane highway unwinding across the moor.

"We were nothing but tourists at Mont Saint- Michel, yet we get tailed across Europe by Cue Ball. In Prague Antonin Pesek, an expensive contract killer, picks up our scent and tries to take us out an hour after his wife skewers a junior clerk at the Venice Archives. The Peseks are pricey, and I'll bet Cue Ball wasn't cheap, either. And the big question is where are they getting their intelligence? Until I nailed Pesek on the boat they were always one step ahead of us. How are they managing that?"

"According to you, this so-called Vatican spy network has had it in for you for quite a while," suggested Meg.

"Maybe it's you they're keeping an eye on," answered Holliday, looking carefully at the young woman behind the wheel.

"Why would they be interested in me?" Meg asked. "I'm an obscure nun doing some historical research into a religious who was only beatified in 1985; she's not even a saint yet."

"Maybe it's this True Ark of yours," replied Holliday. "Could it have some real historical significance to anyone except the Catholic Church?"

"You said it yourself," the nun said and shrugged. "The True Ark is more myth than anything else. I'm sure the Blessed Juliana was trying to keep something entrusted to her safe, but there's no real indication of what it was. It could just have easily been love letters she wrote to her onetime fiance, King Hedwig of Austria."

"Well," said Holliday, "somebody's after something and we'd better find out what it is before it gets us both killed."

Joseph Patchin, Director of Operations for the Central Intelligence Agency, stood in the half-acre backyard of his enormous stone colonial on Upland Terrace in Chevy Chase, orchestrating the three hired chefs at work in front of his Beefeater built- in barbeque and stainless steel outdoor kitchen. He had one hand in the pocket of his Gatsby-style cream-colored linen trousers and the other hand wrapped around a glass of vodka and tonic that was really just tonic. Had to keep your wits about you at parties like this, even if you were the one throwing it.

The half-acre corner lot of the Upland Terrace house was surrounded by mature pines and cedars, as well as a six-foot cedar plank fence and an inner chain- link fence to comply with the neighborhood's strict codes about pool safety. The pool in question was a twenty-by-forty-foot concrete monster that had been installed when the house was built in the early 1950s and had been lovingly maintained by its various owners ever since. Pools in Chevy Chase were de rigueur because it meant you had the money to heat and maintain them and the time to make use of them. Patchin hadn't swum in the damn thing for a couple of years but he still enjoyed the happy asthmatic chugging of the automatic Kreepy Krauly pool cleaner blindly doing its job. The pool was just as much a status symbol as the car and driver that took him to and from the office every day. Conservatively, the house was worth about two million six.

Patchin's wife, Karin, was standing by the steps at the shallow end with a martini in her hand, talking to Ted Axeworthy, the senior partner at Axeworthy, Tate, Zwicker and Lyle, the firm she worked for. Axeworthy had been one of her first lovers outside of their marriage, back when Karin was a young associate.

When she was made partner three years later the relationship came to an end, the only codicil to the affair between them being Karin's promise not to sleep with anyone else at the firm. She'd faithfully kept to the agreement and had begun an endless marathon of sleeping with someone from just about every other firm in Washington, D.C.

The result was that she built up an enviable network of moles providing her with crucial intelligence concerning legal matters in the nation's capital, not to mention lots of gossip. Karin was a slut, but she was no fool; it was that gossip that had greased the rails of Patchin's career within the Agency and would, they both hoped, end with Patchin being nominated to replace the incumbent and ailing attorney general as soon as the pancreatic cancer forced him to step down.

There was very little chance that the nomination wouldn't be approved; thanks to Karin he had enough dirt on enough congressmen and senators to make him a shoo-in. He smiled; it was funny how things worked out. It was a nice symbiotic marriage: she got status and a chance to erase a scholarship past at an Idaho law school and he got what he'd craved since Harvard, raw power.

He watched one of the chefs flipping a pair of ten-ounce fois-gras-and-truffle-stuffed burgers on the grill. Fifty bucks a pop at Dean amp; Deluca, and he was serving them to a hundred or so Washington bigwigs on a Saturday afternoon. With the burgers flipped the chef turned his attention to the Kobe beef hot dogs. Buns made to order by Patisserie Poupon in Georgetown.