Paul Christopher - The Templar throne

"It was like a miracle!" Meg said raggedly as she dug. "The meter went off the scale and the headphones went from a steady ping to a long tone in an instant and I knew it was here! I knew it!"

"What metals?" Holliday asked.

"All of them! That's what is so incredible! Bronze, gold, silver! Even tin. It was reading some kind of heavy metals as well, probably copper or nickel or lead."

"Most likely lead; they used it for drainpipes back then, or tin maybe."

"Help me dig," ordered Meg.

Holliday stripped off his backpack and unlimbered his own shovel. He checked his watch. Twenty minutes left. He dropped down on his knees across from Meg and began to work at the caked, dark sand, widening and broadening the hole. At two feet Meg's shovel hit something with a hollow thump.

Holliday flopped forward onto his stomach. He reached down into the cavity and started sweeping the sand off whatever it was with his outstretched fingers. A few seconds later a carved design appeared, deeply carved into a dark gray metal slab. An engrailed cross, the ancient mark of the Saint-Clairs. Below it was an almost runelike series of letters. Some sort of motto:???o???????.

"That's not Latin, or French," said Meg, a confused look on her face.

"It's ancient Greek," said Holliday, who'd seen the phrase before. "In Latin it's usually rendered as In hoc signo vinces-By this you shall conquer-meaning the cross. The Emperor Constantine saw the phrase in a dream the night before the Battle of Milivian Bridge in A.D. 312. He won the battle and the phrase became his motto thereafter. It was also the motto of the Knights Templar."

"It's the True Ark," whispered Meg, her voice reverent. "We actually found it."

"My, my," said Holliday. "Imagine that." Sister Meg gave him a sharp look.

"Help me dig," she said.

They swept away more sand, then dug carefully around the slab. It took ten minutes, half the remaining time, to reveal that the slab was actually a rectangular box roughly three feet long, eighteen inches wide and a foot high, about the size of an ossuary coffin used for relic bones in the medieval era and apparently made with sheet lead, the inset lid tightly soldered. They managed to lift the surprisingly lightweight container out of the hole and set it down. Both Holliday and Meg examined it closely. The box was perfectly sealed.

"A simple carpenter's cup," whispered Meg, eyes wide.

"Sorry?" Holliday said.

"The Grail," said Meg. "It was a simple carpenter's cup, not some fine jewel. The True Ark is like that."

"I thought you were quoting from an Indiana Jones movie, the one that had Sean Connery in it." Holliday looked at his watch. Five minutes left. Good timing. He stood up and brushed sand off his jeans. He'd been an utter fool.

"How can you be so blasphemous at a time like this?" Meg asked, scowling, still kneeling in front of the box.

"Because I don't believe any of it," said Holliday, his voice bitter. "The whole damned thing has been impossibly convenient. The bald guy in Prague to give it all a sense of urgency, the Irishman O'Keefe and the Mary Deare just where they needed to be, the rubbing in Iona, the hymn, and then you find exactly what you've been searching for after looking for ten or fifteen minutes and only buried a couple of feet deep. There's a saying for it: if it's too good to be true, it probably isn't." Holliday shook his head wearily. "Let's cut the crap, sweetheart. This whole thing has been a crock right from the start and I fell for it hook, line and holy sinker." He reached down, picked up his pack and slung it over one shoulder. He looked down at Meg. She was rummaging for something in her pack. "It was all window dressing, and pretty expensive window dressing at that," he said. "I don't know quite what you're up to, but I hope it was worth it."

He began to turn away as Meg stood up and then he froze. She had a heavy Stechkin APS 9mm pistol in a two-handed grip, rock solid and pointing in the general vicinity of his heart. It was the pistol of choice for Russian Special Forces in Afghanistan. He'd seen plenty of them in the hands of Taliban insurgents himself. Trophies from a lost war.

"Mother warned me that it wouldn't work," said Meg, the gun never wavering. "But I thought it was worth a try."

"Pick up the ark," ordered Meg. Holliday did as she instructed, grabbing the lead box and lifting it with both hands. It weighed about forty pounds, too light to be lead sheet unless it was very thin or just a protective veneer over something else, probably wood. Not the heaviest load he'd ever carried but it was going to slow them down.

"We won't make it back to the boat with me carrying this," said Holliday, looking at Meg. Her red hair was flying wildly in the rising wind, her eyes squinting against the whirling sand. She picked up her pack and shrugged it over one arm. The pistol never wavered and she never looked away. She barely blinked.

The religious fervor was gone, replaced by something cold and hard. It was an entirely different creature than the pretty, defensive, red-haired nun he'd met at Mont Saint-Michel. This Sister Meg was capable of putting a bullet between his eyes without a second thought.

He was no shrink, but crazy seemed like a good enough diagnosis. Behind them the ocean roared and crashed as the gigantic rolling waves battered themselves to death on the broad beach, each one clawing itself a little higher up the sand.

"To hell with Gallant and his stupid boat," Meg answered. "We're setting our own timetable. Get moving." They began to walk back along the hardpan, then veered left at exactly the place where they first walked down to the edge of the lake. He could tell because he could see their boot prints in the broken crust of the sand. They followed their own footsteps to the base of the low, hill- like dunes and found the deep cut trail that had led them here. They began heading up the path.

The sense of the Stechkin aimed between Holliday's shoulder blades was almost physical, like a sudden flash of sunburn or an itch. If he remembered correctly the tough little automatic had a twenty-round magazine and a rate of fire that was somewhere around six hundred rounds a minute. That meant she could empty the pistol into his back in two seconds.

"Smart," said Holliday, speaking to the empty air in front of him. "Using lead. There's no real way of dating it and I'm sure whatever little things you've got tucked away are nice and authentic."

"Shut your mouth," snapped Meg.

"You're not going to shoot me," said Holliday, who wasn't quite sure he believed it. "If you were going to kill me you would have done it by now. For whatever reason you still need me." He paused. "By the way, who is your mother?"

"You never thought to ask me what my last name was, did you?" Meg said behind him.

"I didn't think nuns had last names," said Holliday.

"Nuns were ordinary people before they took their vows, and anyway, who said I was a nun?"

"Are you?"

"I was once, not anymore."

"So what's your last name?" asked Holliday.

"Sinclair. My mother's name is Katherine, if that makes things any clearer."

Holliday remembered a piece he'd read in Time magazine a few months ago, something about there being only a dozen female CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. Kate Sinclair had been number four in a list headed by Angela Braly at WellPoint, Indra Nooyi at PepsiCo and Irene Rosenfeld at Kraft Foods. Kate Sinclair ran an amorphous multinational that had something to do with water.

"The water lady?"

"I doubt she'd take too kindly to that description," said Meg Sinclair. "Mother is the CEO and majority shareholder in the American Fluid Dynamics Corporation. A utilities provider. Her son, my brother, is Richard Pierce Sinclair."