Paul Christopher - The Templar throne

"Bravo, Mr. Holliday. You've almost convinced me."

"But not quite," said Holliday.

"Enough for me to take another rubbing for you of your mysterious knight here," replied the Reverend Walker. "I can have it ready for you this evening. Perhaps you and the good sister would be my guests for dinner. I do a rather nice cabbie claw even if I do say so myself."

"Well," began Holliday, speaking tentatively.

"We'd like that very much," said Meg. "We have a friend, the Irishman who brought us here. Perhaps we could bring him along."

"By all means." The minister beamed. "Shall we say six o'clock, then? I live halfway between here and town. On your left, the cottage with the blue door and ducks in the yard. You can't miss it. I've got quite a library of Iona lore; p'raps we can find out some more about this Jean de Saint-Clair of yours. I'm something of the island's unofficial historian; if the Templar knight of yours is part of Iona's past, then I should know about it."

It took them a few minutes to say their good-byes to Walker, and then they headed back to town and the Mary Deare. As they reached the main road leading away from the abbey they fell in with a straggling group of tourists coming down from Dun I, at three hundred feet the highest point on the island and a favorite vantage point for pictures. It felt a little odd to be walking in the center of a road without a car to be seen, but on the other hand, it gave Holliday a real feeling of what it had been like in the time of the pilgrims.

They reached Reverend Walker's house with its blue door, no more than a whitewashed cottage with half its slates missing. The ducks were there as well, perhaps a dozen of them herded behind a low stone fence that kept the noisy, angry creatures from attacking people walking along the road.

Just beyond the house, on the right, Holliday could see a narrow path leading to the marshy area known as Lochan Mor, the "Abbot's Fishpond," once an artificial lake dammed to provide power to the old granite diggings and now nothing more than a swampy marsh, cut through by a granite causeway that led into the moor-land beyond. The sky was steel gray. The rain had followed them across the narrow strait.

"Colonel Holliday?" asked a polite voice behind them. Holliday stopped and turned. A young man with a marine haircut and wearing a black windbreaker and black chinos was standing right behind them. One of the paintballers. There was a pair of binoculars in a case slung over his left shoulder. The kid looked about eighteen. Too young to be one of his old students. He kept his right hand in his pocket.

"Excuse me?" Holliday said. "Do I know you?"

"You don't have to know me, sir. You just have to do exactly what I say." He pushed his hand forward in the windbreaker pocket and used it to open the jacket so both Holliday and Meg could see the small black metal submachine gun hanging from its sling. There was a fat sausage-shaped suppressor screwed onto the stubby little barrel.

Holliday felt Meg grab his arm, clutching hard at the sight of the weapon.

"Doc?" Meg said.

Holliday kept his eyes on the young man. The gun was a U.S.-made MAC 11, the subcompact version of the MAC 10, once the weapon of choice for the bad guys on Miami Vice and shows like it. The MAC 11 had never found much acceptance with the police, the Secret Service or Special Forces. It was an open-block weapon that was hard to control, and with a small subsonic.380-caliber load it didn't have much stopping power and was only useful in closed environments like airplanes. Holliday couldn't think of any group for whom it was standard issue. All of which meant that the young man standing in front of him probably wasn't any part of the U.S. military.

"Who are you, son?" Holliday asked, trying to engage the young man.

"It doesn't matter who the hell I am," said the boy. "Just turn around and keep walking. When we get to the path turn right. And I'm not your son." There was heat in his voice and wire- taut moves. Holliday knew he was just as likely to squeeze the trigger of the MAC 11 out of fear as anything else. The kid was a firecracker and he was about to go off.

"Doc?" Meg asked.

"Do as he says," answered Holliday. At the path they turned off and headed for the marshy area. As they left the road it began to rain, a light hard spit with promise of a harder downfall in the low dark clouds overhead.

"Where are you taking us?" Meg asked.

"Shut up!" snarled the boy with the MAC 11.

"Boro Bacheh Kooni," said Holliday quietly. "Khar Kos seh, maadar jendeh." There was no response from the young man behind them. Considering what he'd just said to the kid in Farsi, it was unlikely that he'd ever been in Afghanistan or Iraq. "Madar-e-to Gayidam," he added, just to be sure. No reaction from the boy in the windbreaker. A hired gun. A mercenary, but one without much experience. It began to rain harder, gusting sheets rolling across the marshland. The visibility was only a few feet ahead, so presumably they were now invisible from the road as well.

"You haven't been doing this very long, have you?"

"Long enough," the young man answered briefly, his voice tense.

"How old are you, seventeen, eighteen?"

"I'm twenty-one!"

"Sure you are," snorted Holliday, his voice dripping with derision.

"I told you! Shut the hell up!"

Holliday slowed. It was time to play soldier. He took a deep breath; the young man with the submachine gun was way out of his depth. Holliday blinked the rain out of his eyes and spoke.

"One thing you should know if you want to live to see tomorrow, kid: the slide safety in front of the trigger on a MAC 11 should be in the rear position when you're so close behind your prisoner."

Holliday heard the sudden indrawn breath and the faltering step as the young man hesitated. His eyes would have dropped and his right hand would be coming out of his pocket to check the safety. Perhaps a three-second advantage.

Holliday pivoted on his left foot and brought the right around in a side kick to the boy's thigh, pushing him off balance and making him stumble. He lashed out with his left hand, palm outward under the young man's chin, snapping his head back brutally, sending the kid backward. Without even thinking about it he bent his knee and dropped down with all his weight on the boy's chest.

The sound of breaking ribs was audible, bone splintering, as Holliday's knee forced the shattered end of the third rib into the pulmonary artery, rupturing it. The young man gagged, blood spurting from his mouth and nose. He was dead almost before he knew he was on the ground. The boy's bright blue eyes rolled back in his head and he went limp. Holliday stood up.

"Is he dead?" Meg asked in a dull voice.

"Yes," answered Holliday.

"Couldn't you have just… disarmed him?"

"No," said Holliday without any more explanation or justification. Kid or not the young man with the submachine gun had threatened their lives. The boy was supposedly some kind of soldier, and thus had automatically entered into the contract that had existed between enemies since Cain battled Abel: tit for tat, no quarter asked and none given. Kill or be killed.

"So now what?"

"Roll him over and get his jacket off," instructed Holliday.

Meg did as he asked. Holliday looked around. They were well out of sight of the road and no shots had been fired. The only potential problem was someone rushing along the pathway from the other side of the island, anxious to get out of the cold, stinging rain.

Meg finished taking off the kid's jacket and stood up. Holliday squatted down beside the body and stripped off the King Arms Bungee sling and holster, then went through the dead boy's pockets. Keys, a few coins, English and American mixed, a fat Swiss Army knife with all the bells and whistles. A wallet identified him as Ian Andrew Mitchell, twenty-one years old and a resident of Wilmington, Delaware. He also had a Delaware concealed-carry permit, a Beretta.380-caliber mousegun in an in-the-pants holster against his spine. The permit was made out to Mitchell under the authority of Blackhawk Security Systems of Odessa, Delaware. The passport was made out to Andrew Mitchell and listed him as a security consultant.