Paul Christopher - The Templar Cross

"Yes, I know that," Holliday said and nodded. "I'm still trying to figure out why they took her on the expedition in the first place. If the expedition was just a cover for an attempt to find the German gold, why prejudice everything by taking along an outsider?" Holliday shook his head wearily and rolled up the chart. "It doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense."

"No, it does not," replied Tidyman. "Unless they had no choice."

"Explain," said Holliday.

"An expedition without a photographer would have been suspect perhaps. Smithsonian magazine suggests a story; how could they reasonably decline? Miss Blackstock becomes the sacrificial lamb."

"I'm still not sure I buy it," said Holliday. "An American citizen held hostage by terrorists? That shines a pretty big light on these people. Would they have done that knowingly?"

Tidyman shrugged. "There is only one way to find out."

The hold of the Sofia filled to overflowing with tens of thousands of plump, squirming crustacea, Al swung the shallow-draft little trawler close in to shore, his actions hidden on the lee side of the island. As the carvel planking of the boat's almost flat bottom ground against the pebble beach, Holliday, Tidyman and Rafi dropped over the side and waded to the shore. Al would take his catch back to Ponza, a three-hour journey, offload, and then return to Santo Stefano under the cover of night, returning to the little strip of inhospitable shingle with the next low tide, guided by a flashlight signal from Holliday.

Superficially it seemed like a simple enough plan, but as Holliday knew it was the simplest plans that often went the furthest astray. As the three men began to climb the near-vertical track up the cliff he found his thoughts turning to the thousand and one unknowns that could turn their little outing into an unmitigated and deadly disaster. The higher they climbed, clinging to the sheer rock wall, the more exposed Holliday felt, and the stiff breeze plucking insistently at his clothing was like a sour omen of skeletal fingers trying to pull him off his tenuous perch. He silently chided himself for being superstitious and continued to climb.

Calves in agony, knees buckling, Holliday reached the top of the cliff more than an hour later, sweat staining his T-shirt and running in rivers down his forehead, dripping in stinging torrents into his eyes. He fell to his hands and knees, breath coming in ragged gasps, the perfume of the immense field of blue flowers thick in the air. Finally he sat up and opened the binocular case at his hip, bringing out the powerful glasses he'd borrowed from Al.

A football field away the high walls of the horseshoe-shaped prison stood before him, windows and doorways peering blindly at him, empty holes in the old crumbling stone. The sun was level with the sea, turning the old ruins the color of old gold and deepening the shadows. There was no sound except the sighing of the breeze across the field, gently wafting the flowers and the dry screams of the pallid swifts that darted like flitting bats in and out of the ruins. Nothing moved and it seemed that for an instant the world held its breath. Hot and tired as he was, Holliday felt a sudden chill run down his spine.

He'd never thought of himself as being much of a believer in the paranormal, but every once in a while he found himself in places where he could have sworn the fabric of time and place had somehow worn thin and the past found itself uncomfortably close to the present and the future.

Each time he visited Paris and stood on the Champs-Elysees he inevitably heard the echo of Nazi boots goose-stepping on the cobbles, and standing on Burnside's Bridge in Antietam, Maryland, he swore he could hear the roar of cannons and the screams of twenty thousand dying men whose blood stained the muddy waters of the creek below, all in a single day.

"You feel it, don't you?" Tidyman said, flopping down beside him, panting.

"Yes," answered Holliday.

"An evil place," agreed the gray-haired Egyptian, peering across the open field to the ruins. "Four hundred years of pain and suffering leaves its mark, I think."

"I think you're right," said Holliday.

"What are you two old men going on about?" Rafi asked, joining them.

"You're the archaeologist-you should feel it the most," said Holliday.

"Feel what?" Rafi said.

"Time," said Tidyman.

"Superstitious nonsense," scoffed Rafi. A pair of darting swifts screeched like fishwives overhead and Rafi looked up, startled by the sudden sound.

"There's no one here," said Tidyman quietly. "It's empty. I can feel it."

"We can't be sure," said Rafi.

"Let's check it out while we've still got time," suggested Holliday. "If Conti comes, it'll be just before dark, guaranteed.

They walked across the empty field of wildflowers, listening and watching for any sound or sign of movement. There was nothing. They bypassed the ruins of an old wall marking the original prison dating back to Roman times and continued on in the dying sunlight, finally ducking through one of the empty arches into the Bourbon compound. Still nothing.

They climbed a few rough steps cut out of the bedrock and reached the inner courtyard. It was laid out like an ancient monastery, three arched galleries running in a circle, each gallery with cell doors running off it, the fourth tier buried in the old foundations for prisoners doomed to solitary confinement for whatever reason. Four evenly spaced and enclosed square stairways connected one tier to the next around the horseshoe.

In the center of the courtyard the oddly ornate guard tower rose, looking like a belfry without a bell, its dome capped by an iron crucifix long bent and rusted to a shapeless chunk of crusted metal.

"The Mafia was born in places like this," said Holliday, looking around. "Communism, too."

"How's that?" Tidyman asked, interested.

"The Bourbons put all their rotten eggs in one rotten basket," said Holliday. "Put that many Freemasons and revolutionaries together and you invariably get revolution. The Bastille gave you the French Revolution; Attica gave you the rise of Black Power. During World War Two the Germans put all their most dangerous prisoners into Stalag Luft Three P.O.W. Camp and you got the Great Escape."

"I don't think there was ever any great escape from this place," said Tidyman.

"None of which has anything to do with finding Peggy," said Rafi.

The three men split up and began checking the cells, going from tier to tier. All Holliday saw were a few empty beer bottles, the remains of a small fire, and most bizarre, a red-hot water bottle missing its plug. As he searched, something niggled at the back of his mind and finally he figured out what it was: none of the cell windows still had their bars. They had been methodically removed, wrenched from their crumbling enclosures, leaving only gaping stone.

Half an hour later, with the evening light fading fast, Holliday met with Tidyman at the foot of the main gallery.

The Egyptian sighed. He picked up a pebble from among the weeds in the courtyard and tossed it against one crumbling wall.

"There's nothing here, no sign of anyone. We're wasting our time. Perhaps our American taxi driver was spinning tall tales."

From the middle tier Rafi whispered harshly, his voice urgent.

"Somebody's coming!"

They ran across the courtyard to one of the enclosed stairways and climbed upward. They joined Rafi under one of the archways on the second-tier gallery and he led them into the musty interior of one of the old communal cells. Keeping well within the deep shadows they looked out through the empty cell window. They faced southeast, looking down the sloping length of the little island to the sea. At anchor, perhaps two hundred yards from the shore, was the sleek white shape of Massimo Conti's yacht, Disco Volante. On the zigzag path that climbed the cliff Holliday could see a little group trudging upward. He lifted the binoculars and fiddled with the focus.