Gregg Loomis - The Pegasus Secret

Annulewicz shrugged in response to Fitzwilliam's question. "Haven't seen him, Inspector. What's he done that would have Scotland Yard at my door?"

"Police matter; Fitzwilliam said, willing for the moment to perpetuate the charade that they didn't know. "We'd like to talk to him:

Annulewicz turned to the German woman. "Gurt, d'know our old mate Langford Reilly was in town?" She shook her head. "Not until this gentleman asked me if I had seen him: "I see; Fitzwilliam said, as indeed he did. "And when was the last time you were in the U.K., Miss Fuchs?" She shook her head again. "I am unable to remember exactly."

"Ten years or so ago, Miss Fuchs, according to immigration records. I suppose you were suddenly overcome with nostalgia."

"It had been too long," she said.

"I don't suppose either of you have any idea what happened right outside your window, down there on the street?"

"We heard a noise and went downstairs," Annulewicz said. "I came right back up as soon as I saw someone had been hurt. But the police came before I could place a call."

Fitzwilliam reached into a coat pocket and produced a pair of business cards. "I won't bother you further, particularly since it's been so long since the two of you have seen each other. But if you hear from Mr. Reilly, ring me up."

They were both nodding as he left.

Amazing how chummy the two of them were, Fuchs and Annulewicz, Fitzwilliam thought bitterly. Truly amazing since, according to the information he had from the CIA, the two had never met.

London, South Dock

Lang went down the steps of the Lambeth North Underground Station at a pace unlikely to invite attention. He took the first train. There were few passengers, probably because it was after working hours in what was largely a residential neighborhood. He rode for a few minutes before checking the multicolored diagram of the Underground posted in each car. Brown, Bakerloo Line. Three or four stops and he'd be at Piccadilly Circus, only a few blocks from where Mike Jenson, Dealer in Curios, Antiquities, Etcetera had been murdered only… when? Had it been only yesterday?

Lang figured Piccadilly was as good a location as any, better than some. Dinner and theater crowds would provide protective anonymity. And maybe, just maybe, he would get lucky. Maybe an old acquaintance would still be there, one that he doubted was in his service file.

The.train shuddered to a stop. A teenaged couple boarded, he with purple hair and an intricate tattoo of a dragon writhing beneath his tank top, she with green spikes of hair along her scalp like the dorsal ridge of a dinosaur. Her gender was ascertainable only by breasts pressing brown nipples against a T-shirt that had been laundered into gossamer. Both kids dripped rings and pendants from various pierced body parts.

And Lang thought the girl at Ansley Galleries had been weird.

He might as well have been invisible. The two sat at the far end of the coach, oblivious to anything but themselves. How. they managed what the tabloids call intimate embraces without entangling body jewelry was a mystery.

The faces of the only other passengers, two middle-aged women without wedding rings, managed to express disapproval, curiosity and envy all at once.

Lang was watching what was about to become what he termed coitus terminus subterra interruptus-having sex interrupted by a subway stop – as he reviewed the information he had gained. The translation of the Templar papers indicated that area of France, the Languedoc, might be the place he needed to search. Pegasus's business in a largely rural part of Burgundy was hardly coincidental.

Pegasus.

Did a modern, multibillion dollar corporation take its name from the symbol of a monastic order that had been officially disbanded seven hundred years ago, or was it an incarnation of the Templars themselves? Pietro had described the Templar organization in terms that also fit Pegasus: receiving a shitload of money from the pope. Could a secret two millennia old account for everything, both in Pietro's time and Lang's, a secret whose key lay in a copy of a religious painting by a minor artist?

The questions were enough to make his head hurt.

Hand in hand, the adoring punkers got off at Westminster. The two spinsters looked as though they were thankful to have survived a particularly nasty epidemic.

Even with the Templar papers, as Lang mentally referred to them, he knew way too little. He had learned during his stay with the Agency, old aphorisms notwithstanding, what you didn't know was anything but benign. Classic example was Kennedy's decision to withhold air support, un-communicated until troops were already on the beaches of the Bay of Pigs. Bet you couldn't find a veteran of that fiasco who believed what you didn't know couldn't hurt you.

EDFA, the Agency's acronym for "Educate yourself as to the problem, Decide upon the desired result, Formulate the plan most likely to achieve that result, Act."

Sure. Nothing is impossible for he who doesn't have to do it.

Lang had only part of the information he needed. He knew that an organization, possibly of historic origin, certainly of vast economic power, wanted him dead, dead like Jeff and Janet. The desired result was to make the bastards wish they had never heard of Lang Reilly: a payback of cosmic proportions.

And Lang still hadn't done the hard part, formulating a plan. Time to go back to the "educate" stage and start over. Without understanding Pegasus, he would never be able to put a hurt on it. To learn if Pegasus really was somehow connected to the Templars.

Pretty heavy stuff.

Lang had never been particularly religious, probably because as a child he had been dragged out of bed every Sunday morning and forced to spend an hour on the most uncomfortable pew that ever existed in the entire Episcopal Church. Admittedly, he was a little old still to be rebelling. Even in the hours spent in involuntary worship, he didn't remember ever hearing about Jesus being married, let alone surviving the crucifixion like that Lobineau guy Dr. Wolffe mentioned in one of his footnotes.

Medieval religious orders in the twenty-first century? Pretty bogus.

Education.

So far, more questions than answers.

Like, how had They known to come to Jacob's flat? Lang was all but positive he hadn't been followed to the Temple Bar or from Oxford. But if not followed, how? What was it Sherlock Holmes said? Something like, "If you eliminate all possible solutions, only the impossible remains." Impossible someone had discovered his relationship with Jacob through his service records. Impossible.

Therefore the answer?

Lang had been thinking along those lines already when he decided to renew another old acquaintance, one who wouldn't be in any service file.

Lang checked his watch as he climbed up. the steps to street level. Quarter after nine, just after four in Atlanta. When he had called the office from Rome, Sara had referred to Chen, the client Lang had called from the pay phone downstairs in his building. With the cops in the office, she hadn't been able to expressly mention the pay phone but that would have been the only reason to name a client from four or five years ago.

From a public phone in the station, he made, a collect call, a somewhat easier job than it would. have been through an Italian-speaking operator. He assumed there was a tap on the office phone, so he made the call brief.

"Sara, remember Mr. Chen?" he asked. And hung up.

If they could trace that, technology had really improved more than he thought. Star-69, of course, didn't work with international calls. By the time computer records of calls to his office could be searched, he could go around the world on a very slow boat.

He switched phones and used Herr Schneller's Visa card to charge the call. Happily, Gurt hadn't terminated his credit quite yet. Lang was hoping he remembered the right phone number in the office building, that he wasn't calling the deli across the lobby.