Paul Christopher - The Templar Cross

First things first. He unscrewed the silencer from the pistol and put both back into his pocket. He slid the rifle out from under the body and pitched it into the river. That done, he grabbed the dead man by the armpits and dragged the corpse across the shingled beach, then rolled him into the underbrush. Peggy had seen enough death; she didn't need another body to add to the toll.

When he was satisfied he turned back to the path and whistled the first few bars of the old minstrel tune that had somehow become the anthem for a losing army, long ago. As he whistled he felt the weight of the world settle on his shoulders and the strange sense of loss felt when a battle ends. He whistled another few bars then turned and went out to the boat.

He stepped over the curving deck and took the leather key tag out of his pocket. He sat down behind the white Bakelite wheel, put the key into the ignition, then twisted the port starter to the On position. There was a coughing sound and then a deep-throated rumbling as the massive engine came to muttering life. He twisted the starboard starter and the second engine echoed its mate.

He tugged the throttle just a little and the muttering became a muted roar. Holliday smiled. It was like having two tigers tugging on a leash. Emil Tidyman would have enjoyed this, he thought, his heart sinking a little. Then Rafi and Peggy appeared out of the darkness and, seeing them, Holliday's heart lifted once again.

Rafi stared at the speedboat.

"Good Lord," he said.

"Neat," said Peggy. "Can I drive?"

"No," said Holliday. "Unhitch the line and climb in. We're going home."

And that's what they did.

Holliday sat behind his desk in the study of the little house on West Point's Professor's Row. There was early snow on the ground outside and he had a fire burning in the grate. It was the day before Thanksgiving and once again West Point was almost empty. Anyone who had anywhere to go had gone. Home for the holidays. He looked around the room.

The floor was stacked with boxes ready to go into storage and all the bookshelves were empty. The house was well on its way to becoming a barren shell of naked walls and vacant rooms, no longer anyone's home.

The inquiry into the death of the killer who'd attacked him on the same day Rafi had arrived at his door seeking help was done and Holliday had been completely exonerated.

His term as the head of the History Department at the United States Military Academy was formally complete, papers signed, position resigned, re-up declined. As the old science fiction writers used to put it, life as he knew it was over. He was unemployed and homeless. Peggy was in Jerusalem with her new husband and he was alone.

The funny thing was, he didn't give a damn. In fact, he was looking forward to whatever was coming his way. His time tracking down Peggy halfway across Africa had taught him at least one good lesson: friends were precious, life even more so and time was the only real treasure.

He sat in the firelight, remembering. They'd parted ways in Paris after taking the big speedboat downriver to the Adriatic coast and then south, away from Venice and down to Ravenna. From there getting to Paris had been easy.

During a farewell meal in the Terminal R brasserie at the Radisson SAS hotel at Charles de Gaulle Airport, Rafi had asked him how he'd been tipped that the man posing as Czinner was an impostor. Holliday pulled the big West Point graduation ring out of his pocket and laid it down on the table.

"What a cool jewel you got from your school," said Holliday, smiling.

"Pardonnez-moi?" Peggy said in an atrocious French accent.

"That was Czinner's reaction," said Holliday. "He recovered very quickly, but not quickly enough. A West Pointer would know. I knew then that he wasn't Czinner. I was ready for him."

"I don't get it," said Rafi. He picked up the big signet ring and looked at it closely, an archaeologist at work, trying to decipher the artifact.

"It's a ritual, a poem," Holliday explained. He quoted the whole thing: Oh my gosh, sir, what a beautiful ring. What a crass mass of brass and glass. What a bold mold of rolled gold. What a cool jewel you got from your school. See how it sparkles and shines. It must have cost you a fortune Please, sir, may I touch it, May I touch it, please, sir.

"Not the greatest poetry I've ever heard," said Peggy.

"I still don't get it," said Rafi. He put the ring back on the table.

Holliday picked it up and slipped it back into his pocket. The ring was engraved with Czinner's names and dates, and eventually he'd send it to Vince Caruso at the embassy so he could get it to where it rightfully belonged. He finished his explanation.

"Like I said, it's a ritual. A hazing thing for freshman cadets. Back in the day every plebe at West Point had to learn that verse by heart, on pain of death, or at least a severe dressing-down and some punishment duty. When he saw a student from that year's graduating class wearing his ring the plebe had to salute, fall to his knees and recite the poem. If you remembered any piece of poetry at West Point, that would be it. They still do it, only now you don't fall to your knees."

"Your West Point is a very strange place," said Rafi, grinning. "Its first commandant your country's greatest traitor, assassination attempts, now young men falling to their knees and reciting awful poetry. It's a wonder you've won so many wars." He shook his head in mock consternation.

"Yes," agreed Holliday, "but there's no place like home."

And now home was a thing of the past.

Speaking of things from the past.

Holliday smiled to himself, staring into the crackling fire and listening to the November wind rattling angrily at the windows. At least he'd know how to find his way to the new one. And to find his way back to Alhazred's hidden gold. Gold that he'd find again and make sure got back to its rightful inheritors.

He opened the drawer and pulled out the only memento he had of his terrible time in the desert. Two shaped strips of wood, dark with age, both eight-inch squared rods carved with tiny symbols, numbers from thousands of years before. One of the strips was drilled with a square hole that exactly fit the dimensions of the other.

Put together it formed a slightly mismatched cruciform with the inner arm able to slide up and down within its mate. The same cruciform the figure of Imhotep held in the boat fresco on the wall of his hidden tomb. The cruciform object he found, forgotten within the huge stone sarcophagus.

He'd realized instantly what the little wooden objects were and somehow he'd managed to keep them with him and hidden for the rest of his journey. Two strips of ancient wood more valuable than the tons of bullion on the underground chamber floor.

Two strips of wood that would have given the archaeologists from Jerusalem, or Rafik Alhazred, almost unlimited fame. Two strips that gave the ironic lie to the old name for Father Thomas's covert organization, Organum Sanctum, the Instrument of God.

Holliday fit the two little squared rods together and slid them up and down. Almost as elegant as Imhotep's translation of the beehive tomb design of his native land into the gigantic pyramids of his adopted home. As simple and perhaps almost as brilliant in its own way as the most famous equation in the world: E = mc2.

The two little sticks, brought together in the correct way, its symbols read as degrees of angle when pointed toward the sun, was the first navigation instrument that allowed men to leave the shore and travel the ocean. A true Instrument of God to a man like Imhotep, whose greatest god was Ra, the sun, and whose private god was knowledge.

Effectively the two sticks joined were a simple version of a Jacob's Staff, named for the man who had invented it, Jacob ben Machir ibn Tibbon, a Jewish astronomer living in Provence in the thirteenth century. Except Tibbon had not invented it-Imhotep had, approximately four thousand years before him. The invention, and the fresco in the hidden tomb, brought up another possibility: