Paul Christopher - The Templar Cross

"I think it's Peggy," whispered Holliday, not quite believing it. His cousin was walking between two muscular-looking armed men. Conti and another man in conversation walked behind them. Conti was dressed in shorts and a T-shirt. The man with him was dressed in a dark suit with a stark white collar. A priest? Peggy appeared to be unharmed but she looked terribly tired, her usually bright features drawn and haggard.

"Let me see!" Rafi hissed. Holliday handed him the glasses.

Rafi swore.

"It is her!" he breathed. "The bastard's had her on that boat all this time!"

"But why bring her here?" Tidyman asked.

"It doesn't matter!" Rafi said furiously. "I'll kill the son of a bitch!"

"Those guards are both wearing shoulder rigs," said Holliday. "They'd kill you first."

Rafi swung the glasses a little to one side.

"The man speaking with Conti. When they announced the expedition they had his picture in Archaeology magazine. That's Charles-Etienne Brasseur, the expedition leader, from the Biblical Archaeology School in Jerusalem."

"The man who went after the gold?" Holliday asked. He took the glasses back from Rafi and focused on the group again. "What on earth is he doing here? And what is he doing with Peggy?"

"Listen!" Tidyman said. In the distance they could hear the distinct whickering sound of an approaching helicopter. A big one.

"What the hell is going on?" Holliday said. He watched as the group reached the top of the zigzag track and paused. The helicopter came in low out of the west and thundered over the top of the old prison enclosure. Dust blew up in swirling clouds as the big machine came in overhead.

It settled slowly onto the broad, slightly sloping field like some giant insect, the flowers bending beneath the powerful downdraft of the five-bladed rotors. It was a big Sikorsky SH-3, the one they called the Sea King. The livery was white with a broad blue stripe around the midline. There were patches taped over the places where the roundels and service name would ordinarily be but the bird was clearly military. There was no visible weaponry; it was a VIP transport. But where was it from and where was it going?

The Sea King had a range of more than six hundred miles; not far but enough to put it down from the coast of Spain to the Black Sea and all of continental Europe in between. With a long-range fuel tank a chopper like that could take you halfway to Moscow. A needle in a hundred haystacks.

The engines cycled down to an idling whine and the rotors continued to whirl lazily. A doorway opened in the hull just behind the cockpit and someone inside lowered a short set of stairs. Massimo Conti and his group came forward a few paces, then stopped again. Peggy looked around blearily as though she was trying to get her bearings. Holliday felt a lurch in his stomach, his heart going out to her, but he knew there was nothing he could do.

Beside him Rafi made a small sound in his throat and tore the binoculars out of Holliday's grip. Someone stepped down from the helicopter and waved at Conti, standing a few yards away. The man was tall and completely bald. Rafi swung the glasses away from the group, focusing on the new arrival. Suddenly he dropped the glasses away from his eyes and stared blindly out through the dark opening of the cell window. The blood drained visibly from his face.

"What's wrong?" Holliday said.

"It's him," whispered Rafi, real horror in his face. "The bald one. I'd recognize him anywhere. The guy who stole the Crusader scroll from us. The one who had me beaten half to death a year ago in Jerusalem. It's him. He's here."

Rafi handed over the binoculars. Holliday looked, seeing the man for the first time. Rafi's beating had come at the hands of the same people who'd tried to kill Holliday and Peggy in a back alley in Old Jerusalem on the same night a year ago. Call them what you wanted, Black Templars, La Sapiniere, Sodalitium Pianum, Organum Sanctum, the Instrument of God, it was all the same, and then and there he knew where the big white helicopter had come from and where it was going: its destination was Rome. The Vatican.

The three men arrived in Rome after an hour-long train ride up the coast from Anzio. They reached the Roma Termini station in the late afternoon, almost exactly twenty-four hours after first seeing Peggy on the prison island of Santo Stefano. Stepping off the train, Holliday spotted a man in a Marine Corps service uniform greeting a friend on the platform and immediately braced him. The Marine turned out to be a West Point graduate, although one well before Holliday's time there. The Marine also turned out to be part of the security detail at the U.S. embassy, and he gave Holliday directions to the old palazzo on the Via Veneto as well as a few contact names to smooth the way.

At the embassy Holliday went through security while Rafi and Tidyman waited at a table under the awning at the Cafe de Paris across the street. Almost an hour later, Holliday reappeared and joined his companions at the cafe. Acting on the advice he'd been given at the embassy, they took another taxi through the hectic downtown area and headed northwest. Skirting the high walls of the Holy See, they were eventually dropped off in front of the Alimandi Hotel at Viale Vaticano, 99.

The five-story building, once a police station and then a police association retirement home, had been refurbished into a four-star hotel complete with a roof garden restaurant that looked directly across at the ornate main entrance through the high walls to the Vatican Museums and the Sistine Chapel.

"So how exactly is this going to work?" Rafi asked as they settled into their suite of rooms. Holliday stepped out onto the balcony and looked out onto the Vatican rooftops. Part of the church since the time of Constantine more than fifteen hundred years ago, it was exactly what it appeared to be, a fortress state guarded by high stone walls and two thousand years of tradition-as well as being the single largest corporate entity in the world. And he was about to take it on. I must be out of my mind, he thought.

Holliday let out a long breath and felt an itch at the back of his throat-a sense memory of a time when he'd smoked two packages of unfiltered Camel cigarettes a day. Standing there in the warm afternoon light he knew he could start again in an instant, even though it had been almost twenty years. He glanced down at the cobblestone plaza in front of the high arched entrance through the wall. Souvenir carts and ice cream vendors were parked in front of the entrance like remora cleaning the teeth of a cruising shark. He sighed again and turned back into the room.

"So how is this going to work?" Rafi asked again.

"Maybe it's not," answered Holliday.

"You really think Peggy is in there?" Rafi said.

"Probably not, but the way to get her back is."

"And how are we to work this act of magic?" Tidyman asked, dropping down into a silk-covered armchair.

Holliday turned back to the view out the doors leading to the balcony.

"First we have to find the right bird, then tempt it out of its cage so it can sing."

"So how do we find the bird?" Tidyman asked.

"Call it," said Holliday.

In the end it turned out to be remarkably easy. An initial telephone call to the Pontifical Institute of Christian Archaeology on the Via Napoleone III and mentioning his own name, the name of Sodalitium Pianum and Walter Rauff all in the same sentence elicited a polite callback, which in turn led to a second call from the Second Section of the Vatican Secretary of State's office thanking Holliday for his interest and suggesting that in furtherance of his interests a visit to the Gregorian Egyptian Museum on the following day at noon might be in order. It wasn't stated in the conversation but the implication was clear: he should come alone if he had any expectations of "furthering his interests."