Paul Christopher - The Templar throne

The Mary Deare came upon the Holy Isle two hours after dawn on the following morning, the mist still lying along the narrow strait between Iona and Mull, the island itself no more than a thin green line rising only a little above the darker green of the sea. As they neared the island and the mist cleared, Holliday could see a scattering of houses at the foot of a low, twin- humped hill.

The houses looked like so many perching gulls spread out along the shore, their roofs dark slate and the walls a brilliant washed white that glowed in the rising sun. At the northern end of the island they could see a second hill, much smaller, but much higher than the one with the houses huddled below it. The second hill had to be the famous Dun I, Iona's Hill, called Mt. Zion by St. Columba and Temple Mount by the nuns and priests who came after him. According to Reverend Walker in his book, the summit of Dun I was St. Columba's favorite place to meditate as he vainly looked back for a sight of his beloved Ireland. The next nearest landfall was actually seventeen hundred nautical miles away on Newfoundland's Avalon Peninsula, home to the first European settlement in the New World.

O'Keefe radioed the harbormaster and they eased into the tiny bay, warping into the simple stone and concrete pier that jutted out from the rocky shore. On the other side of the pier the MV Loch Buie, a small passenger and car ferry, was loading up with walk-ons going back to Fionnphort on the Island of Mull, a mile away across the narrow strait to the east.

From the look of the steel gray clouds and the silvery curtain that lay over Mull, it was raining cats and dogs, but Iona was graced with a kind, warm sun with just enough breeze to puff out the sails of a Sea Scout squadron of Bug-class Lasers on a race round the small island.

"It's beautiful," said Meg as they stepped off the boat, Holliday behind her. He looked back at the wheelhouse of the Mary Deare and saw O'Keefe was still standing at the wheel. He'd told them he had work to do in the engine room when he declined Meg's invitation to come with them, but there he was talking into the radio microphone.

Holliday didn't bother mentioning his growing suspicions to Meg; she was completely taken by the man's smooth and smiling charm. Yesterday, standing at the wheel, he'd crooned a succession of maudlin Irish ballads, like "Four Green Fields" and "The Rising of the Moon." Holliday had tried to bait O'Keefe into revealing his true colors by casually mentioning that in his opinion the Irish fought so much simply because they enjoyed it; after all, they were the only nation in the world who had a district of their capital city named for a style of drunken brawl: Donnybrook. O'Keefe had just smiled and said, "Now isn't that the bloody truth then, yeah?"

Holliday turned again, following Sister Meg down the pier. O'Keefe was no Hollywood Irishman; there was something deeper and darker going on there. When they got back to the Mary Deare he was going to find out just what it was. The first step perhaps was a look in the old puffer's cargo hold.

They cut through the crowd of outgoing and incoming passengers and reached the end of the pier. Ahead of them a dozen or so men sporting marine haircuts and carrying identical enormous black sports bags were laughing and talking together.

Holliday kept well back and watched them carefully until he saw that they were wearing matching black windbreakers with "48th Fighter Wing Paintball Team, Lakenheath" emblazed on the back. Flyboys from the Statue of Liberty Wing down in Suffolk. Holliday and Meg reached the end of the pier and asked a likely-looking local wearing gum boots and a tattered roll-neck sweater for directions. He pointed to a small white building close to the shore to the left of the pier.

"Tha's post office," the local drawled. "E'll tell ye were to go all right." The man laughed at his small joke, hawked and spit into the water. They went to the post office. A grave-looking man named Mockitt gave them directions to the abbey where the Reverend Walker was working. Holliday bought a Mars Bar from a display on the counter and they left the post office.

They walked up a gravel pathway to the main north-south road. There wasn't a car to be seen; the road was full of walkers with a few wobbling, hired bicycles here and there. The wind picked up and Holliday looked back toward Mull. Then he broke the gooey Mars Bar in half and handed the larger piece to Meg.

"They deep-fry Mars Bars here," commented Holliday. He took a bite of the tooth-achingly sweet candy bar.

"No way!" Meg responded.

"No word of a lie. Same oil as the chips."

"That's disgusting!" Meg answered.

"When in Rome and all that," Holliday said and grinned. He took another bite from his portion and smacked his lips. "Yum-yum."

"Now you're being disgusting."

The Sea Scouts had disappeared behind the sheeting rain off the coast of the larger island. He grinned; they'd be soaking wet and enjoying every minute of it, safe from their mothers' anxieties about catching their death.

The cadets at West Point had been just the same, thriving on muddy maneuvers in the rain or on the obstacle course, their uniforms filthy, their faces even dirtier, their eyes bright.

He missed his kids and the teaching. He missed West Point, something he hadn't thought possible. Most of all he missed Amy, as he knew he would as she lay dying, more than ten years in the past. He turned to the road ahead, Meg a few steps ahead of him now, and thought about Amy all the way to the abbey.

Mockitt's directions had been correct; the abbey stood on the slightly sloping ground a mile or so from the town, a group of gray stone buildings huddled on the sparse land, a low stone fence running along beside the road for a hundred yards or so, enclosing an anonymous field of gorse.

As abbeys went there was nothing exceptional about it except for its isolated location. According to the Reverend Walker's guidebook it had been built on the site of St. Columba's original parish church in 1203 and expanded over the years to include a refectory, a nearby nunnery and even a scriptorium, in which it was said the magnificent illuminated manuscript known as the Book of Kells, Ireland's most prized possession, was created, even though it had originated on the little Scottish island.

They found Walker in the refectory on the far side of the cloister. The big man was up on a ladder scrubbing what appeared to be a square of plastic wrap against something high on the wall between two narrow windows.

The reverend was large in every sense of the word, tall, big-bellied, ginger- haired with a full beard and a thick curling mustache. Sensing their presence, the big man twisted slightly on the ladder. Like many men his size he was quite graceful. He wore old-fashioned tortoiseshell spectacles, his eyebrows riding over the lenses like furry red caterpillars.

"Hi-ho," he said, his face breaking into a wide smile. "Come to see a man of the cloth fall from grace, have you?" He gave a snorting laugh. "Wouldn't be the first time, that's certain enough!" The accent was Scots but the burr had been softened after years elsewhere. At a guess Holliday would have bet on Cambridge or perhaps Oxford.

"Reverend Walker?"

" 'Tis I," said the big man. He came down the ladder and greeted them properly, hand extended. He shook Holliday's first and then Meg's. They introduced themselves.

"Just taking molds of a few more Mason's Marks. One finds them in the strangest places. He held out his hand and showed them the small reverse impressions of the obscure glyphs: arrows, reversed number fours, circle letters, two Xs side by side.

The minister had made the impressions with some sort of plasticine. "It's called flex-dough," explained Reverend Walker. "It's not dough at all, of course-it's some sort of plastic. It's usually used by stroke victims to exercise their hands with, but it makes a perfect matrix for taking mold impressions. I make plaster reproductions of all the marks with it."