Paul Christopher - The Templar throne

"What have you done?" Sister Meg groaned, stooping down over the wounded man. Holliday pushed her aside and removed the sling and the submachine gun. He laid the MAC 11 on the sand and rolled the man over, none too gently. The man screamed.

"You're hurting him!" Meg said furiously.

"Good," said Holliday blandly. The man was carrying a Beretta identical to the one Holliday had shot him with. "Push the boat into the water. I'm going to drag this one up beyond the tide line." Holliday grabbed the man by his collar and started hauling him up the beach.

"We can't just leave him here!"

"We're sure as hell not taking him with us," said Holliday. He reached the tide line, marked by a line of drying kelp and driftwood, and let the man drop. He walked back to the boat, ignoring Meg, and heaved on the transom. As the boat slipped into the water Holliday levered himself over the gunwale and dropped down onto the flat wooden bench. He eased the outboard over the transom and started looking for the starter.

"What are you doing?" Meg asked, staring at him, a little wild-eyed.

"Leaving before your friend Sean figures out what's going on and calls in the cavalry," said Holliday. "If you're coming, you'd better get in."

Holliday found the electric starter and punched it, one hand on the throttle arm. Small waves were already moving the old clinker-built fishing boat into deeper water. Meg hesitated for a second longer, then waded out into the water and threw her backpack into the boat. She grabbed the gunwale and boosted herself up and in. The engine caught with a coughing roar. Holliday twisted the tiller arm and pointed the dory out to sea.

Katherine Franklin Sinclair, widow of the late Angus Pierce Sinclair, the onetime ambassador to the Court of St. James in London, and mother to Senator Richard Pierce Sinclair, sat at a corner table in the Senate Dining Room having lunch with her son. Katherine was enjoying the bacon-wrapped scallops and her son was having a tuna sandwich, toasted on white with a side of fries.

The Senate majority leader was at a table behind them and the head of the Armed Services Committee was eating a cheeseburger one table over. Heady stuff, but if Kate Sinclair had her way it was going to get a lot better on November 8 next year, the date of the next federal election.

Katherine was adorned in a red Nancy Reagan dress, her white hair done in a sprayed and brittle- looking perm. She looked like a once-beautiful, dried-up Palm Beach matriarch, which was exactly what she was. Her son was dressed like a senator: dark chalk-stripe suit, dark Florsheims, white shirt with gold and cobalt blue presidential cuff links given to him by G.W. himself to commemorate his Senate appointment, and a burgundy and silver Phillips Exeter Academy Alumni tie.

"There's nothing to discuss, Richard. The immigration bill is key to your election."

"The Latino vote in California was one of the keys to Obama being elected; I'll lose it if I vote for a bill that requires all Mexicans to register with Homeland Security and carry a special photo ID card. It's like putting yellow stars on Jews."

"It will play in every state in the union except California. It will win you back all the Bush states that Mc-Cain lost. It will also show that you can stand firm for the principles that made this country what it is."

"Your principles, Mother."

"Who cares whose principles they are? They've worked in the past and they'll work now. The country's a mess; you can clean it up and the first step is to throw out the trash."

"It won't do too much for my status in the party," said the handsome forty-something senator. He took a bite out of the oozing sandwich and put it down on his plate again. He chewed and sighed simultaneously. Kate Sinclair looked at her son and wished he had a little more spine. On the other hand, she knew where the soft side of his nature came from; growing up as Angus Sinclair's only son and in the ambassador's long shadow hadn't been easy. Most of Richard Sinclair's life had been ordained without him having any choice in the matter. Schools: Exeter and Yale. Discipline: law. Career: public service, followed by a strategic and well-thought-out jump to the Senate. Next logical step: a run at the White House. It had been Angus Sinclair's plan even before his son's birth, the banner eagerly taken up by Katherine upon her husband's death.

"To hell with the party," the aging woman said at last. "You have real power on your side."

"You mean your so-called friends in high places?" Senator Sinclair said, his lip curling. He knew exactly what his mother was talking about.

"Your friends, too," answered Katherine. "They've helped you along the way, helped pave the road to your success."

"You mean they paid for it," said the senator. "Which makes me beholden to them, right?"

"They only want what's best for the country," said Katherine. She sliced a scallop in half with her knife, added a daub of creamed spinach and popped the morsel neatly between her thin lips. She chewed without appearing to move her jaw, a trick she'd learned at Miss Porter's School in Framingham many years before.

"That's what Hitler told the Poles just before he invaded," her son answered sourly. He took another bite of his toasted tuna.

"Don't be irritating," snapped his mother. "You know exactly what I'm talking about and who. There's no choice in the matter. You are the next in line; simple history makes you heir if nothing else. You'll be the de facto head of the order and all its resources. Electing you president will be easy after that."

"You really believe Rex Deus still has that kind of power?" Senator Sinclair scoffed, popping a French fry into his mouth. He chewed.

"I know they do," his mother answered. "And you know it, too."

She was right, of course. The senator let out a long breath. Rex Deus and his place in it had been part of his life for as long as he could remember. Rex Deus, once also known as the Desposyni, supposedly the bloodline of Jesus Christ through Mary, his mother, leading all the way to the Merovingian royal families of Europe, was historical fact, at least insofar as its historical existence was concerned.

At one time the Desposyni had been regarded as the aristocracy of the early Church, but over the centuries Rex Deus had become an underground secret society with money and power at its core. Like the Masons, Rex Deus was attractive to the early colonizers of America, especially during the prerevolutionary 1700s, and there were as many Rex Deus signers of the Declaration of Independence as there were Freemasons, including, among others, Benjamin Franklin, of whom Katherine Sinclair was a direct descendant, and Robert Payne, an ancestor of Angus Sinclair.

By 1776 the battle lines had been clearly drawn; American diplomacy with their colonial masters was at an impasse. It was clear that the British would eventually ban slavery, if for no other reason than stopping the growth of the American cotton industry. Added to this was the tax imposed on the colonists by the crown to pay for the French and Indian War, plus the increased prices for manufactured goods imported into the colonies.

The Masons and the members of Rex Deus were either wealthy landowners or equally wealthy merchants, and it was no coincidence that a third of the signers of the Declaration were slave owners. The Continental Congress and the Declaration of Independence were established to fuel an American financial revolution just as much as a political one. Then, as now, it had been all about wealth and power.

"There are other people who want to be elected head of the order," said Senator Sinclair. "It's not as though I'm the only one."

"The Magdalene Conclave is in less than two weeks," insisted Katherine, her voice low as she leaned across the table. "We will win the election and you will become the new head of the order."