Paul Christopher - The Sword of the Templars

“I’m in the kitchen!” Peggy called.

“Coming,” said Holliday. He pushed up onto his hands and knees then sprinted for the archway into the kitchen. Too late. The oak-plank door at the end of the short hallway was thrown open on his right. A figure in hiking boots, jeans, and a dark green pullover surged into the hallway, a long-barreled weapon in his hand. Russian, a Bizon submachine gun with all the bells and whistles including a suppressor, a POSP sniper scope on the upper rail, and a sixty-four-round helical feed magazine slung under the barrel. Enough to start his own private war but clumsy to handle in the confines of the hallway.

The man wasn’t wearing a vest. He raised the big assault rifle as he jumped forward, but the extra-long suppressor snagged a bookcase on his left, losing him half a second of response time. And his life. Holliday aimed center of mass and started squeezing the trigger on the old Mauser again and again at a range of about ten feet.

The bullets punched into the man’s chest, the Mauser barking loudly. Six rounds, six hits, four more in the magazine. The man with the big assault rifle made a brief sighing noise and then toppled over. Holliday stepped forward and caught him, dropping the Mauser and taking the rifle out of the dead man’s unresponsive hands, feeling the corpse’s last rattling breath on his cheek. There was a tattoo on the inside of the dead man’s right wrist: a sword, its blade enclosed by a ribbonlike loop and surrounded by a band of runic letters.

Holliday eased the body to the floor, then stepped forward and kicked the door shut. He walked backward, stepping over the dead man, the assault rifle locked and loaded in his arms. He bent down and picked up the Mauser, dropping it into his jacket pocket, then backed out of the hall and crouched down.

Still three shooters, or only two now? There wasn’t a sound. However many men were still out there, they would have heard the unexpected, harsh report of the Mauser and they’d know that something was wrong. Holliday hefted the Bizon in his hands and smiled grimly to himself. Something was wrong, but not with him. Rusty maybe, but an old soldier armed to the teeth.

“You okay?” he called to Peggy.

“Yes,” she replied.

He listened. Silence. “I’m coming in.”

He scuttled forward in a crab walk and went through the wide, oak-truss archway. The kitchen was obviously very old. There was a huge fireplace of hand-cut stone and ballast bricks with a beehive oven to one side against the back wall. A massive maple cutting block stood on hand-hewn peg legs in the center of the room, with pots and implements hanging overhead as well as a forest of garlic and drying herbs.

The ceiling was some dark wood, blackened with age, and the floor was made of pine planks, pegged, at least a foot wide. There was one small, deeply inset window to the left of the fireplace and very high on the wall, and a row of Victorian kitchen cabinets against one wall.

Only the appliances were vaguely modern: a white-enameled refrigerator with a drum top from the forties and an older Aga gas cooker and range. No dishwasher. The counters were tarnished zinc. The sinks were galvanized metal.

There was an oddly placed narrow door between the sinks and the window. It faced north, toward the trees that lined the lane leading to L’Espoir. There was a heavy ring of keys suspended from a spike hammered into the frame. Peggy was standing with a meat cleaver raised in her hand beside the maple chopping block. She stared at the assault rifle in Holliday’s hands.

“Where’d you get that?”

“Never mind.”

“The old man is dead, isn’t he?” Peggy said. “I didn’t really look too closely, but he’s dead, isn’t he?”

“Yes, he’s dead,” nodded Holliday.

“This is crazy,” said Peggy. She was breathing hard, eyes wide.

“It’s the sword,” said Holliday. “It’s got to be, it can’t be anything else.”

“They killed him,” said Peggy weakly. Her chest was rising and falling too quickly; she was hyperventilating, the adrenaline running through her hard. He knew the feeling. It could carry you away, make you want to do something, to make a move, any move, rather than hold your position and figure the odds.

“There are at least two of them out there, maybe three. Someone must have followed us here from the airport. They were ready for us.”

“You think Broadbent set this up?” Peggy asked, unbelievingly.

“There’s some connection. Now’s not the time to try and figure it out. We’ve got to get out of here alive.”

“Amen to that,” said Peggy. “How?”

Holliday pointed the barrel of the assault rifle at the narrow door in the kitchen wall.

“That leads to the vegetable garden. I saw it on the way in. The garden’s between that stone granary and the side of the house.”

The building was square, twelve feet on a side with a conical thatched roof and raised on “straddle stones” to keep out vermin and the damp. There were no windows, only a wide plank door on one side. The space between the ground and the floor was too narrow and too constricted to be a sniper position; their attackers were effectively blind on that side. Coming out the kitchen door, the granary would be in front of them beyond the vegetable garden with a line of trees twenty yards to the west on their left, separating L’Espoir from the main road.

The rental car and Carr-Harris’s Land Rover would be ten yards to their right, the Land Rover screening the little Toyota. The Land Rover was a four-door with right-hand drive. The Toyota was a two door; to get somebody into the passenger seat would require going around to the open side of the vehicle, exposing them to killing fire.

“Where are the keys to the rental?” Holliday asked.

“In my bag,” said Peggy. The bag, miraculously, was still slung over her shoulder. The Toyota key had an electronic buzzer. He looked over Peggy’s shoulder at the spike on the doorframe. There was no plastic buzzer key. He closed his eyes for a second, visualizing the moment when they rolled into Carr-Harris’s farmyard.

Was the window of the Rover rolled down or was it closed? Would someone like Carr-Harris lock up his vehicle or leave it open? Hard to say. It didn’t really matter; they didn’t have too many options, and they were running out of time. He had kept the door to his house bolted; he’d heard the old man throwing it open when he answered the knock.

But maybe he never used that door. Maybe he came into the house through the kitchen. Lots of people did that; the country version of coming in through the garage. Holliday glanced at the door. No bolt. He frowned. Too much to think about; he was getting a headache. His own adrenaline was still pumping. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. The bad guys would be regrouping. Now or never.

“Do exactly what I tell you,” said Holliday.

He explained the plan to Peggy, and less than two minutes later, keeping low, he cracked open the kitchen door and listened. Nothing but the cascade rustle of wind in the trees and the rattling shiver of it blowing the bulrushes around the little pond like dry bones.

He felt a sharp tug of old memory: a sinister moment in a dark movie theatre long ago, watching a film called Blowup as the actor David Hemmings stands in a strange, silent parkland, listening to that same ghost wind sound, wondering if he has just witnessed a murder. All of that with the grassy knoll in Dallas still relatively fresh in everyone’s mind. Knowing what it’s going to feel like a split second later when everything is suddenly about to go terribly wrong and your life is about to change forever. He blinked in the afternoon sunlight and tried to shake off the sudden sense of ominous dread. And failed.