Paul Christopher - The Sword of the Templars

“Walk around the front of the car and stand on the shoulder,” ordered Holliday. Kellerman did as he was told. So far he had barely spoken. Less than five minutes had passed since the tables had abruptly turned. Holliday followed Kellerman around the big car, the.45 aimed squarely at the small of the man’s back. Kellerman glanced down at the crumpled bodies of his security guards.

“Stefan has a two-year-old son. Hans was about to be married.”

“Spare the sentiment,” said Holliday. “It doesn’t suit you.”

“I will kill you for this,” pledged Kellerman.

“So what?” Holliday said. “You were going to kill us anyway.” He turned to Peggy. “Search him. Weapons and cell phones.”

“Do I have to?”

“Yes. Give me the gun.” She handed him the weapon. He popped out the magazine and put both pistol and magazine into the pocket of his jacket. Peggy searched Kellerman. She came up with a Deutsche Telekom iPhone and a palm-sized Beretta Tomcat.32-caliber automatic. Holliday put both into his other pocket.

He turned back to Kellerman. “Roll your friends into the ditch.”

The German gave Holliday a long appraising look but said nothing. He dragged the bodies to the edge of the ditch that ran beside the shoulder of the road and pushed them over.

“And now?” Kellerman asked sourly.

“And now we go,” said Holliday. “When the next Autobahnpolizei patrol comes by you can explain how your two dead employees got that way.”

Peggy stepped forward, looked into the front seat at the mess, and then got into the back. Keeping the big automatic trained on Kellerman, Holliday got behind the wheel and switched on the ignition.

“I think I’m going to be sick,” said Peggy weakly. “Please get me out of here.”

Holliday spun the wheel, making a U-turn and heading them back toward Friedrichshafen. He stepped down on the gas. In the rearview mirror the tall figure of Axel Kellerman receded and then was swallowed up by the darkness.

“We lost the pictures,” said Holliday.

“No, we didn’t,” said Peggy from the backseat. She poked her hand into the back pocket of her jeans. She pulled out a slim piece of plastic a little bigger than a piece of Juicy Fruit gum and held it up for Holliday to see. The word “Sony” was imprinted on the side.

“What’s that?” Holliday asked.

“A flash memory stick,” she answered. “I downloaded the pictures while we were still in Kellerman’s Batcave. We’ve got them all. Like I said, Doc, welcome to the digital age.”

“How are you doing?” Holliday asked. It was shortly after the lunch-hour rush, and they were sitting in an outdoor cafй just off the Piazza del Gesщ Nuovo in the coastal city of Naples, Italy. Peggy was drinking from a green bottle of ice-cold Nastro Azzuro, and Holliday was on his second cappuccino. The crusty remains of an excellent margherita pizza lay between them on a serving platter. It was hot, bright sunlight shining down out of a brilliant blue sky. Traffic roared loudly around the square. Two days had passed since their gruesome adventure in Friedrichshafen.

“How am I?” Peggy said. “I’m still trying to figure out how we got from there to here.”

“By train.” Holliday smiled.

“I didn’t mean that,” she said.

“I know,” he said quietly. He glanced out across the piazza. In the center of the slightly tilted cobble-stone square loomed the soaring, ornate, rococo Guglia dell’Immacolata obelisk, erected by the Jesuits in the seventeenth century to commemorate the Immaculate Conception and to consecrate their new basilica, after which the piazza was named.

The piazza was the historic center of the old city by the sea, but its importance had faded long ago, and now, instead of praying priests and monks from holy orders, the streets were lined with bars and clubs and by-the-slice pizza shops, the sidewalks thronged with tourists, the roadway jammed with trucks and cars and rushing scooters, their sewing machine engines whining like enraged mosquitoes as they threaded their way dangerously in and out of the rushing traffic that circled endlessly around the enormous spire. It was a long way from the lonely roadside in the Bavarian Alps.

After leaving Kellerman in the darkness, they’d driven back toward the Schloss, retrieving their rental from where they’d parked it on the far side of the bluff that held the castle ruins. There they abandoned the Mercedes with Drabeck’s body in the trunk.

Holliday drove them into Friedrichshafen, just managing to catch the 10:40 ferry, the last one of the day. They reached the Swiss side of the lake forty-five minutes later and arrived in Zurich two hours after that. Peggy found a twenty-four hour Internet cafй where they accessed the memory stick and printed out the diary photographs in ninety-four double-page entries.

They checked the sheets one by one, looking for a familiar word or name. They found what they were looking for in the entry for Monday, September 27, 1943: the word “Naples” and a name-Amedeo Maiuri, the Italian archaeologist who’d originally discovered the sword during his excavations in Pompeii, a few miles south of the city in the shadow of Vesuvius, the towering volcano that loomed over the Neapolitan landscape.

It was enough for Holliday. They boarded the morning high-speed train to Milan, and then took the slower overnight train to Florence, once the home of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and, much later, Salvatore Fer ragamo, shoemaker to the stars. In Florence they took the requisite pages from Lutz Kellerman’s wartime diary to the people at the local Berlitz office and had them translated. Translations done, they continued on to Naples.

Peggy nursed her beer and stared blankly out at the whirling traffic and the chattering crowds on the sidewalks. Her time in Friedrichshafen had taken its toll. She looked worn, tired, and depressed. Holliday wasn’t surprised; he wasn’t faring much better. Since the beginning of their pell-mell escapade he’d seen five men die and had been directly responsible for the violent deaths of three of them. Whether they deserved it or not was irrelevant; he’d been the one who’d snuffed out their lives. Their blood was on his hands, and the responsibility for that weighed heavily on him.

“Do you want to quit?” Holliday said.

Peggy turned to him, startled. “What?”

“Do you want to quit?” he repeated. “We can stop right now, you know. Get on a plane and be back home in time for breakfast tomorrow.”

She frowned and took a little sip of beer. She put the bottle down, picking at the paper label with her thumbnail.

“I’m not like you,” said Peggy finally. “I’m not a soldier. I see bad things in a viewfinder, not for real.”

“Believe me, kiddo, I don’t feel any different than you do,” responded Holliday.

“I want the bad stuff to be over,” she said. “Is it?”

Holliday shrugged.

“There’s an old saying that dates back to the Bourbon kings-‘Vedi Napoli e poi muori.’ ‘See Naples and die.’ ” He paused and shrugged again. “Bad stuff begets bad stuff, battles breed more battles, and one war leads to the next. There’s no guarantee that it’s all going to be clear sailing from here on out.”

“What about Kellerman?”

“What about him?” Holliday replied.

“Is he going to quit now?”

“He knows what’s in his father’s diary. He’s connected. It wouldn’t be hard for him to track us down.” Holliday shook his head. “No, he won’t quit.”

“Then neither should we.”

They drove the bright red Fiat 500 rental inland from the Bay of Naples, skirting the brooding base of a sleeping Mount Vesuvius then headed into the rolling countryside beyond. All around them were neat vineyards and stands of walnut trees, hazelnut trees, apricots, and centuries-old groves of olives. The entire area was supposedly controlled by the Camorra, a homegrown Neapolitan version of the Mafia, but there was no sign of it here.