Paul Christopher - The Templar throne

Brennan shrugged. "Orders come and orders go, but assets remain. Money never disappears, it simply changes hands. Holliday has access to a great deal of power if he wishes to use it."

"Is he using it?" Spada asked.

"It has come to our attention that Holliday has become involved with the political machinations of Rex Deus."

Spada laughed. He patted his lips with a starched napkin, his lips curving up in what passed for a smile.

"It really is extraordinary how things take hold," said the cardinal. "A man writes a silly novel based on the premise that a homosexual Italian artist from the sixteenth century would have the slightest interest in the concept of the divine feminine and would waste his time encoding obscure references to it in an obscure fresco in an even more obscure church in Milan. Da Vinci's drawing of Vitruvian Man is just that-a man, not a woman. The idea is farcical but the book sold tens of millions of copies."

The cardinal shook his head. "Rex Deus and the idea that there is a family tree for Jesus Christ is just as silly as the plot for The Da Vinci Code, but people still believe it, just like Shirley MacLaine and her followers believing they're all descendants of Cleopatra. Have you ever wondered why none of them find out that in a past life they were one of the slaves who built the pyramids? It's always Cleopatra, or Napoleon, or Jesus, never the plumber from down the street. Rex Deus is like the Templars: wishful thinking."

Brennan shoveled another mouthful of food into his mouth, then washed it down with a slug of wine. He dug into the pocket of his jacket and took out a crumpled pack of Macedonia cigarettes, fished one out and lit it with a kitchen match he'd taken from his other pocket. He dropped the dead match into what was left of his polenta.

"You may well be right, but the reality is that this man Holliday is capable of causing us a great deal of trouble."

"So what would you have me do? Sanction his murder?" The cardinal let out a barking laugh. "Unleash the Vatican's secret army of albino monks on him?" The man in the red silk skullcap shook his head. "Assassination is bad for the Church's image, especially with a German Pope occupying Peter's throne."

"It's not Peter's throne that concerns me," grunted Brennan.

"What's that supposed to mean?" Spada asked irritably.

"Rex Deus is having a convocation of its members sometime later in the summer. Kate Sinclair is involved."

The cardinal suddenly looked concerned.

"The senator's mother?"

"The presidential candidate's mother," corrected Brennan. "There's a rumor about the True Ark going around. Sinclair's looking for it."

"The True Ark is a myth."

"Maybe not."

"And Holliday?"

"He's one of the people looking for it."

"Hired by Sinclair?"

"I have no idea, but we need to find out. If Holliday's connections to the new Templars ever join forces with Rex Deus it could give us serious problems. Financial ones. Since the global economy took a turn for the worse the Vatican Bank has become stretched very thin. It can't be allowed to be stretched any thinner." Brennan took a deep drag on the cigarette. Below the terrace the sounds of heavy nighttime traffic could be heard.

"What are you proposing?" Cardinal Spada asked.

"Nothing more than a watching brief for now. Find out why Kate Sinclair is looking for a relic that probably doesn't exist and find out what Holliday's involvement is. Apparently he is on his way to Prague in the company of one of ours-a Clare Sister from the Agnes of Bohemia convent."

"What do we know about her?"

"Nothing."

"Find out," suggested Cardinal Spada.

They crossed the Czech border at Rozvadov. Before the Soviet Union fell apart, Rozvadov had been a gloomy place in the forest with a no- man's-land of tree stumps, barbed wire, land mines and guard towers full of armed men. Now it was a modern waypoint with lines of bored truckers waiting for their bonded loads of Mercedes parts and beer to be passed through customs.

As they were waved over the line after showing their passports, Holliday glanced to his left. The no-man'sland was still there, a healed gash like the path of a whirl-wind through the dark trees, but the stumps were gone and so was the barbed wire and the guard towers. It was like the old Civil War battlegrounds back home-rolling green sod. Picnic parks where the blood of thousands and sometimes tens of thousands had been spilled, and for what? Emancipation? Breaking the Southern cotton cartels? A difference of attitude? A hundred and fifty years later whatever it was didn't really seem to matter anymore and the hundreds of thousands of soldiers were still just as dead and gone.

He drove the big rental VW sedan through the pleasant rural countryside beyond the forest and thought about soldiers and wars and dying for your country. They'd asked him to pose for a recruiting poster once because he looked so romantic with his weathered, outdoor, Marlboro Man face, not to mention the rakish look of adventure the patch on his eye gave him. He turned them down because it was all a lie.

The army wasn't a ticket to travel and adventure and anyone with a brain in his head knew it. The army was a gamble. You got a free education if you wanted it, in return for the strong possibility of having your legs or your arms or your head blown off by an Iraqi or an Afghani or a Pakistani with a stick of dynamite, a RadioShack detonator, and a bag of rusty nails for a payload.

The truth of it was most people who joined the army or the navy or the air force or the marines didn't have a brain in their heads; they were too young and wet behind the ears. And they didn't join up to protect their country or make the world safe for democracy-they joined up because they couldn't get a job anywhere else, or they were trying to get away from something the way Holliday had been trying to get away from his drunk, abusive old man when he joined up.

And there certainly wasn't anything romantic about his eye, or lack of it. Like an idiot he'd been riding with his head up out of the hatch of a Humvee on a road outside Kabul, and like a forgetful idiot he hadn't been wearing his protective goggles. A piece of gravel thrown up by the tires had scratched his cornea and it became infected and eventually he'd lost the eye.

"A penny for them," said Sister Meg, sitting primly in the passenger seat, hands folded in her lap.

"You don't want to know," said Holliday.

"It's still a hundred and fifty kilometers to Prague; we have to talk about something."

Holliday knew she was trying to be friendly but he wasn't in the mood.

"I was wondering why soldiers become soldiers," he said finally. "And I couldn't come up with one good reason."

"I expect it's the same reason priests become priests and nuns become nuns," answered Sister Meg instantly. "Because they believe in what they're doing."

"Bull," snapped Holliday coldly. "You're talking about heroic gestures. Heroes are generally pretty stupid, in my experience. And on a battlefield the last thing you're thinking about is belief in anything beyond your own immediate survival. If you're thinking about anything other than pissing your own pants and saving your own skin maybe you're thinking about the buddy you're sharing your foxhole with, but that's about it. In war the operative emotion is fear, believe me."

"You're a very cynical man, Mr. Holliday."

"I've been in a lot more wars than you have, Sister. True believers and heroes make the worst soldiers. They take foolish unnecessary risks and they get people killed."

The red-haired nun gave him what was probably her most withering look.

"If everyone thought that way there never would have been an American Revolution," she argued. Her hands were balled into fists on her lap now and there were red, flushed circles on her cheeks.