Paul Christopher - The Templar Cross

"Good," said Holliday. He could almost feel the blood rushing through his veins. "That's it. Are we ready?"

"Ready," said Tidyman.

"Ready," said Rafi.

Holliday smiled to himself, a little surprised at the depth of his emotions.

He hadn't felt this alive in years. This was who he was.

"Let's saddle up then," he said.

"Not 'lock and load'?" Rafi grinned.

"Different generation," said Holliday. "I'm from the John Wayne era, but yeah, that too."

For Holliday it was a simple exercise in applied tactics: when faced with a superior numerical force the primary objective was to distract the enemy and split his forces; divide and conquer. The Normandy invasion was a classic example: make Rommel's forces believe that the invasion was coming at Pas de Calais, the obvious choice, then attack somewhere else, in that case the beaches at Normandy.

For Rafi and Tidyman it was a bit too obvious, like a high school football play: fake left, go right. Distract the priest and his thugs and send them on a wild-goose chase to the north on the subway line, but attack them with a much smaller force to the south, into the heart of enemy territory.

Using a map of Rome and Vince Caruso's familiarity with the city, they concocted a Robert Ludlum-Jason Bourne, cat-and-mouse, hither-and-yon, hares-and-hounds game across the city that would supposedly lead the priest and his men to where the exchange of Peggy for the location of the bullion would take place. In fact, it would all be a figment of their collective imaginations, the moves and countermoves orchestrated with generic, throwaway cell phones and overseen by Lieutenant Caruso driving his Italian girlfriend's Dragon Red Vespa GTS-250 scooter. With the paper chase concentrating Father Thomas and his colleagues, Holliday, Rafi and Tidyman would meet at the Marconi Bridge on the downstream River Tiber, then board a river sightseeing cruiser down to the old ruins at Ostia Antica, Rome's original port, now two miles inland after the deposit of three thousand years' worth of accumulated river silt.

If things went according to plan they would discover a speedboat left for them by Vince Caruso at the marina where the sightseeing boat docked, which they would then use to reach the fishing shack where Peggy was being held hostage.

Like most rescue plans it looked perfect on paper, and like most rescue plans, as Holliday well knew, it would be anything but perfect in its execution. Still, it wasn't bad for something put together in a hurry. In every theater of war Holliday had fought in, he'd seen much worse plans generated by entire committees of so-called experts, and over the years he'd developed a basic rule of thumb: in war, just like cooking, too many cooks just screwed things up. In his own mind it was all pretty straightforward. Find Peggy, kill anybody who got in their way, grab her and get the hell out of town as quickly as possible.

The Ponte Guglielmo Marconi crossed the Tiber River south of Rome in a surprisingly rural area, especially on the southern side. The dock for the sightseeing boats was located a little downstream of the wide modern bridge on the bank of the river, squeezed in between a junior league rugby field and some fenced- off public tennis courts. The only way to get to it was down a dirt road that seemed to peter off the farther along you went. If it hadn't been for Lieutenant Caruso's detailed directions none of them would have ever found it. On the other hand, it was the perfect spot for a rendezvous; if anyone was following you they could be spotted a mile off. The boat was a small converted passenger ferry named, not surprisingly, the M.V. Horatio. She had three wedding-cake decks outfitted with restaurant-style booths set beside large tinted picture windows.

Holliday arrived first and waited on the dock, receiving updates from Caruso on his cell phone every few minutes. As far as the young lieutenant could see everything was going according to plan. Father Thomas had successfully retrieved the cell phone left for him in the potted shrub by Tidyman and had begun his wild-goose chase. According to Caruso there was no sign of the bald Father Damaso.

At eleven forty Emil Tidyman arrived, improbably dressed as a tourist in a Hawaiian shirt, a straw hat and big sunglasses with both binoculars and a camera hung around his neck. Ten minutes later Rafi appeared on the dock. As far as Holliday could tell neither man had been followed. He waited until they were about to pull in the gangplank before he boarded the broad-beamed, top-heavy ferry, and shortly afterward the M.V. Horatio eased out into the turbid green water and began making its ponderous way downstream.

They made their way along the sinuous snaking river for an hour. It wasn't very exciting as sightseeing trips went; the great buildings and monuments of Rome had been built farther upstream, centered on the city's seven hills. For the most part all there was to see was the pastoral weed-choked banks of the river and the spans of various modern bridges. The advantage to Holliday and his companions was that taking the sightseeing boat made pursuit unlikely, if not impossible.

The Horatio eventually turned in toward shore and docked at a comfortably ramshackle pier at Ostia Antica. The ruins, an entire city of them, were spread out over hundreds of acres. The buildings, no more than crumbling walls and tiled floors, were silent testament to the ancient port city's violent end.

In A.D. 67 bands of roving pirates had descended on the city in ragtag fleets, burning everything as they went, eventually leading to the enactment of the Lex Gabinia, the law of Gabianus, its creator, giving the emperor of Rome far-reaching and completely arbitrary powers that were reminiscent of the panicked regulations enacted after 9/11.

Power corrupts, Holliday reminded himself as he stepped off the boat, and absolute power corrupts absolutely; Father Thomas and his minions were proof enough of that. The pastoral teachings of a wandering prophet had been perverted into a tool of war.

Instead of following the rest of the passengers up the path toward the ruins, Holliday, Rafi and Tidyman turned right, taking a barely visible dirt track that ran beneath the old trees along the riverbank.

"This is like something out of a really bad Disney movie," said Tidyman. "Tales of the Riverbank or something. You expect Bambi to come out of the trees or bluebirds singing a merry tune and dropping daisies on our heads."

"What do you know about Disney movies?" Holliday asked.

"I used to run home from school every day just to watch Annette Funicello's breasts grow on the Mickey Mouse Club," said Tidyman. "Zorro. Davy Crocket."

"Thumper," added Holliday. "Bambi."

"Just remember what happened to Bambi's mother," cautioned Tidyman, laughing.

"You've got a very strange sense of humor for an Egyptian," said Holliday.

"What are you old men mumbling about now?" said Rafi, bringing up the rear of the little procession filing through the trees.

"I think it is called whistling in the dark," said Tidyman. "Smiling in the face of adversity."

A hundred feet farther along the low bank they came upon an old man fishing with a long pole, just as Vince Caruso had described. The man had white hair as fine as a baby's over a spotted skull, white stubble on his chin. Probably one of the army of relatives that Caruso seemed to have just about everywhere. There was a plastic bucket of squirming silver-bellied eels beside the man.

"Qual e il tranello?" Holliday asked, carefully repeating the phrase just the way Caruso had told him. "What's the catch?"

"Oggi c'e la pesca del salmone," the old man answered with a gap-toothed grin. "Salmon is the catch of the day." It was the correct response.

"La barca?" Holliday asked. "The boat?"