Lost City of the Templars (2 page)

“It is a bug,” said Eddie Cabrera, staring down at the thing in the box. “A very big bug, but still a bug after all.”

“But don’t you see? It can’t be a bug.”

“It is a bug.” Eddie shrugged. “It has wings and many little feet and a round head with antennae sticking out of it. Of course it is a bug, my friend. It can be nothing else.”

“What I mean is it can’t be a bug in the present. A creature this large only got that way because of the much heavier concentrations of oxygen in the air millions of years ago.”

“All right, then,” said Eddie. “It is a very old bug.”

“But it’s not,” said Rafi. “It’s only been dead for a few years, a hundred at most.”

“A dead bug is a dead bug, Doctor. How long it has been dead and pinned down to a piece of wood with its wings torn off is of very little interest to the bug in question. A hundred years, millions, what does it matter to the bug?”

“A philosophical Cuban, dear God,” murmured Rafi Wanounou.

“He’s been hanging around with Doc for too long,” said Peggy Blackstock, sprawled across the couch in their suite at Claridge’s Hotel in London and reading the room service menu. “I wonder if I should have the chocolate and black currant cannelloni or the praline streusel with the salt butterscotch ice cream.”

“How about a cup of tea with lemon and a slice of dry toast?” said Rafi.

“Is that supposed to be a comment on my weight?” Peggy asked. “Because we haven’t been married long enough for you to make comments like that.”

“It’s a comment on the health of your arteries,” laughed Rafi. “I am a doctor, you know.”

“You’re a doctor of archaeology,” said Peggy. “The last artery you looked at belonged to a ten-thousand-year-old mummified dog.”

“It was a cat actually.”

Lieutenant Colonel John “Doc” Holliday, U.S. Army Rangers (retired), came out of one of the bedrooms in the lavish hotel suite, a stapled folder in his hands containing a photocopy of the complete journals Peggy and Rafi had found in the chest picked up at the auction in Torquay. “Has anyone actually read these things?” he asked.

“I flipped through them,” said Peggy with a shrug.

“I thought I’d leave that to you,” said Rafi.

“Fawcett made eight trips to the Amazon Basin. On the last one he disappeared.”

“Which is when all the legends started.” Peggy nodded.

“Two things that are mentioned in the journals—he was financed by a mysterious group that called itself ‘the Glove’ and he made a secret trip to the Arquivo Distrital de Lisboa, the Lisbon Archives in Portugal. He was particularly interested in a shipping company owned by someone named Pedro de Menezes Portocarrero, a high-ranking officer in the navy and also a big wheel in the spice trade, particularly pepper, which was worth its weight in gold back in the fourteen hundreds. It also appears that Pedro was a bigwig in the Real Ordem dos Cavaleiros de Nosso Senhor Jesus Cristo.”

“The Templars,” said Eddie. “The same as the Brotherhood in Cuba.”

“Exactly,” said Holliday. “Anyway, in 1437 he sent three of his biggest ships to Goa in the Indian Ocean. They were the
Santo Antonio de Padua
, the
Santo Ovidio de Braga
and the
Santo João de Deus
. He also dropped off a man in the Azores named Gonçalo Velho Cabral, a Portuguese monk and commander in the Order of Christ who was effectively the first governor of the islands. Cabral was traveling on board the
Santo Antonio de Padua
and mentioned to the captain that the ship seemed to be riding very low in the water for a vessel under ballast and outward bound in search of cargo.”

“Too much information, too many names,” complained Peggy.

“Give me a second,” soothed Holliday. “I’m getting to the point.”

“Thank God,” muttered Peggy.

“After voicing his suspicions the captain simply handed Cabral a white leather glove and nothing more was said. Fawcett only discovered this by cross-indexing Cabral’s name in the archives and reading his journals. The glove was a sign that the ships were on Templar business, so Cabral kept his mouth shut.”

“Go on,” said Rafi, taking an interest now, his enormous, impossible “bug” forgotten for the moment.

“Back then riding currents was really the only way to navigate. For a ship to go from Lisbon to Goa, they’d ride the North Atlantic Drift down past the Canaries, catch the Equatorial Countercurrent under the Horn of Africa and then head west and south on the South Equatorial Current until they reached the Cape of Good Hope, where they’d swing east again and pick up the currents in the Indian Ocean. Except they never made it.”

“What does that have to do with Fawcett?” Peggy asked.

“Nothing,” said Holliday. “Except that the South Equatorial Current swings right past the mouth of the Amazon, and while Eddie and I were cooling our jets in the Bahamas a while back, the Excalibur Marine Exploration Corporation, which is a fancy name for a bunch of Brit treasure hunters, announced that they’d found the remains of a four-masted ship; there’s almost no doubt that she’s the
Santo Antonio de Padua.
”

“I still don’t get it,” said Peggy. “Boats sink or go down in hurricanes.”

“The ships were supposedly heading to Goa to pick up a shipment of pepper. According to Excalibur Marine Exploration, the hull of the
Santo Antonio de Padua
was stacked with barrels full of gold coins.”

“Coins to buy the pepper with.” Peggy shrugged.

“Twelve tons of French Charles the Fifth gold francs?”

“It does seem a bit extreme,” the young woman agreed.

“None of the ships ever made it to Goa and none of the ships ever returned.”

“You’re saying they went up the Amazon?” Rafi asked.

“That, and something else; I think our friends ‘the Glove’ knew that long before they financed Fawcett’s trip.”

“No entiendo,”
said Eddie. “Explain this.”

“Sure. The guy who was the British grand master of the White Templars in 1925 was a man named Sir Hugo Sinclair, second viscount of Stonehurst and later Lord Grayle of Ashford.”

“We know this how?” Peggy asked.

“Because his name is in the notebook Brother Rodrigues gave me as he lay dying on the island of Corvo in the Azores. The same notebook that gave me the numbers I can use to pay for suites like this at Claridge’s.”

“I thought you only used that money when it had something to do with the Templars now,” said Rafi.

“It does,” said Holliday. “Guess who the chairman and CEO of Excalibur Marine is.”

“Tell us before we all die of curiosity,” sighed Peggy.

“Lord Adrian Grayle, Hugo Sinclair’s grandson. One of the men on his board of directors is none other than Dimitri Antonin Rogov.”

“Oh dear,” said Peggy.

The British Museum of Natural History on London’s Cromwell Road would have provided excellent lodgings for Harry Potter’s Voldemort or Tolkien’s Sauron. It had ten times more Victorian towers and oddball staircases than the Smithsonian Castle in Washington and looked even more ominous than the Spasskaya Tower in the Kremlin. All of which was a little odd since it was designed and built by a British Quaker named Alfred Waterhouse in 1881—though perhaps not so odd given that Waterhouse’s first commission as an architect had been a cemetery. The collections of the museum went back more than two hundred years to the “Curiosities” collected by Sir Hans Sloane, the Irish physician, which eventually formed the basis of the British Museum, of which the Natural History Museum was an offshoot.

Rafi and the rest of the crew found Professor Kenneth Anger, Oxon, Balliol College, M.A., Ph.D. several times over, emeritus director of the Department of Invertebrate Anthropology in the tower room he’d been assigned to after turning seventy and stepping down as the active director. Anger himself looked like everyone’s idea of a cartoon Merlin the Magician. He was barely more than five feet tall with long snow-white hair, a long white beard and wire-rimmed spectacles perched halfway down a Roman nose far too big for his plump, small face.

The professor’s round office was relatively roomy and contained dozens of heavy shelves filled with bits and pieces of fossilized creatures, most of them insects. The leftover space was given over to a desk, piles of books and papers, three cozy armchairs upholstered in green leather and a gas fireplace in the corner. When they opened the door to the office, the diminutive professor was standing on the top rung of a rickety-looking wooden library ladder trying to find something on one of the upper shelves. He suddenly gave a cry of triumph, grabbed at a foot-square oblong of rock and proceeded to tip over backward, toppling off the ladder.

“Dios!”
Eddie said. He took three huge steps forward and caught Anger only a split second from the stone floor and a fractured spine.

“Good Lord!” Anger said as Eddie stood him on his feet. He staggered weakly to his desk and sat down behind it. “Very kind of you. I do hope you didn’t strain anything.”

“You don’t weigh much more than a bird, Professor.” Eddie smiled, towering over the man.

“Qué tipo de ave?”
Anger asked curiously. The professor spoke eight different languages, the result of a lifetime spent digging up fossils all over the world.

“A large goose perhaps.” Eddie smiled again.

“Ah yes,
Anatidae
; quite a large family. Not my field really. There was a very large gooselike creature called
Dasornus emuinus
, which used to fly up and down the Thames fifty million years ago skimming the water for fish. It had teeth and a five-meter wingspan.”

“Fascinating,” said Rafi, sitting down in one of the armchairs. “What would you call a meat-eating dragonfly with meter-long wings?”

“Meganeura,”
said Anger promptly. “I’ve got one or two in my collection.” He waved a small hand at the shelves around him.

“We’ve got one, too,” said Holliday. “From a survivor of Fawcett’s last expedition in 1925.”

“You can’t mean Percy Fawcett,” said Anger.

“The very one,” replied Holliday.

“I had no idea he was interested in fossils,” said Anger musingly. “I should have thought blowguns and shrunken heads would be more his sort of thing.”

“Apparently not,” said Holliday.

“You wouldn’t happen to have brought it with you, I suppose.”

“As a matter of fact, we did,” said Peggy. She stood up, walked over to the professor’s desk and put the box down in front of Anger. The elderly paleontologist took the top off the box and stared down into it.

“This can’t be,” he said, looking up at his visitors, eyes blinking rapidly behind his spectacles.

“But it is,” said Rafi.

“But it can’t be,” said Anger. “It’s scientifically impossible. During the carboniferous era a hundred million years ago, the atmosphere was much denser and the oxygen levels were extremely high. That’s most of the reason creatures like
Meganeura
and
Dasornus emuinus
grew so large. The weight of their bodies and wings today would make it physically impossible to fly.”

“But it did fly, and not ten millions years ago. The evidence is right in front of your eyes.”

“Is there any documentation regarding this . . . insect’s provenance?” Professor Anger asked, looking down into the box.

“None,” said Holliday.

“This doesn’t require Sherlock Holmes to deduce,” said the professor. “Fawcett explored the Amazon Basin primarily. We can assume that it came from somewhere in that vicinity.” Anger steepled his hands together under his very large nose.

“Big vicinity,” said Holliday.

“Not when you take the other necessary requirements into consideration.”

“An area of high oxygenation,” said Rafi.

“And somewhere isolated from the surrounding ecosystems,” said the professor. “A creature like this one wouldn’t survive long in an area where there were large predators.”

“Where do you get areas of high oxygenation in the Amazon?” Peggy asked.

“The landform would most likely be a sinkhole of some sort, a large one,” said the professor. “And it would require a great deal of niter in the soil.”

“I was no good at high school chemistry,” said Peggy.

“
Salitre
,” said Eddie. “In English you call it saltpeter.” He smiled. “That Cuban education of mine, senora, it was very good no matter what you think of poor old Fidel.”

“Bravo, Senor Cabrera, quite right.” Anger nodded.

“So, where do you find that combination?” Peggy asked.

“A
tepui
, I should think, probably a large unexplored one next to the border with Venezuela.”

“Okay,” said Holliday. “You’ve been a great help.”

“My pleasure,” said Anger. “If there’s anything else I can do to help . . .”

“Actually, there is,” said Holliday. “You could take care of our
Meganeura
for us.”

“Certainly,” said the professor, “I’d be happy to.”

“And keep it under your hat?”

“Under my hat . . . oh, yes, quite! Mum’s the word.”

•   •   •

Pierre Ducos, French master of the White Templars, sat at the end of the long walnut table in the principal dining room of Lord Grayle’s Stonehurst Hall, a long white leather gauntlet set formally in front of him.

Four other masters of the White Glove sat at the table with him: Lord Adrian Grayle, the third duke of Stonehurst, the English master; Klaus Tancred of Germany; Antonio Ruffino of Italy; and Katherine Sinclair of the United States, a distant cousin of Sir Adrian’s. There was a gauntlet in front of each master, a tradition dating back to the original Templars and later adopted by the Masons, the white standing for purity, the jousting glove expressive of their willingness to take up arms for the cause.

“Can this man Rogov be trusted?” asked Ruffino, the rotund Armani-suited Italian.

“Of course not,” said Ducos. “But his evidence can.” Ducos picked up his worn leather dispatch case and put it on the table. He withdrew a heavy object swathed in a covering of black velvet, then opened the cloth. Gleaming on the cloth was an oblong ingot of gold eight inches long, three inches wide and an inch thick. Stamped crudely in the center of the ingot was a Templar Cross. “There is no doubt this comes from one of our three ships. From Rogov’s data, it was most likely the
Santo
Antonio de Padua
, the smallest of the three.”

“The other two reached their destination?” Sir Adrian asked.

“According to Rogov, there is no sign of either the
Santo Ovidio de Braga
or the
Santo João de Deus
at the wreck sight. Both ships had a shallow enough draft to reach far up the Amazon, and both carried barges to get even farther. According to Mrs. Sinclair’s connections with American remote sensing satellite corporations, there is evidence that both ships did reach the Lost City.”

“So let us go and retrieve what is ours.” Tancred the German master shrugged. “What is the problem? Frau Sinclair certainly has the resources in the area, and funding is certainly not a problem.”

“The problem, I am afraid, is a dead monk named Helder Rodriguez and the potential involvement of his chosen acolyte, Lieutenant Colonel John Holliday.”

“This man Holliday, he haunts us at every step,” said Tacred bitterly.

“He has cost us a great deal of money, certainly,” said Ruffino.

“He cost me a daughter and a son,” said Kate Sinclair. “I want him dead.”

“We all share your pain, Madame Sinclair, and also your desire to see him dead. The question is, how do we accomplish such a goal?”

“Perhaps my brother the cardinal can help us there.” Ruffino smiled, folding his hands across his ample belly.

•   •   •

In 1959, at the age of sixteen, Arturo Bonnifacio Ruffino, second son of Angelo Ruffino, one of the largest shoe manufacturers in Italy, made a momentous decision. He knew well enough that while he would have all the wealth he could ever desire, his brother, Antonio, would inherit the company now controlled by his father and, with it, the power.

Although he didn’t have a religious bone in his body, Arturo knew that the next best place for him to gain the power, the desire for which was a constant need more addictive than any drug, almost certainly lay in the Church. With that in mind he enrolled in the archiepiscopal seminary of Milan that eventually and inevitably led him toward the Vatican.

The inevitability of his destination was predictable; his father was already a good friend to the Church, and after his son was ordained that friendship became even stronger. By twenty-five Ruffino was secretary to a bishop, and by thirty-five he was a bishop himself, active on more than one powerful committee. By fifty he was Holy See representative for the Vatican at the United Nations.

By fifty-eight he was elevated to cardinal and on the recent death of Cardinal Spada he was made the Vatican secretary of state. With the present Holy Father clearly ailing, there was only one final rung on the ladder. Along with the secretariat came the reins of Sodalitium Pianum, the Vatican Secret Service, its longtime director, Father Thomas Brennan, recently gone to his heavenly reward in less than godly circumstances in the middle of an at-home massage given by a therapist who also happened to be an assassin. His choice to replace Brennan was a priest named Vittorio Monti, a friend from his first days at the seminary and also his longtime sexual partner.

Like Spada and Brennan before them, the two men rarely had confidential conversations in either man’s office. During his first few months as director of Sodalitium Pianum Monti, acting on Ruffino’s instructions, had tapped every important phone line and bugged every important office and conference room in the Vatican with an assortment of high-tech audio and video devices. The walls of the Holy See really did have eyes and ears.

For totally private discussions the two men generally met early each day for prayer in the Sistine Chapel, four of Monti’s men scattered around the church to ensure that no one except Michelangelo’s God and all His saints were there to overhear them.

“My brother has a request,” said the cardinal.

“About this man Holliday you mentioned to me?” Monti asked.

“Yes,” said Ruffino. “We’ve had a watcher on him since Brennan’s time. He also wants you to keep a close eye on Sir Adrian Grayle.”

“And who is Grayle?”

“A British industrialist who does a great deal of business in Brazil. My brother is financially involved with him. He has heard rumors that Grayle is up to no good.”

The Secret Service director was not an ugly man, but he had a permanent and ungainly limp from a bout with childhood polio. Entering the seminary a year behind Ruffino, the slightly older boy had immediately taken the crippled and very self-conscious Monti under his wing. It was this early bond that had cemented Monti’s loyalty to Ruffino and made him totally trustworthy.

“Where is Holliday now?”

“London, with his cousin, her husband and his friend, a Cuban named Cabrera. Grayle is in America, but he’ll be back in London tomorrow.”

“The cousin recently discovered a number of potentially valuable notebooks. We need the notebooks and we need Holliday and his little entourage removed as a threat.”

“I’ll get on it immediately.” Monti laid a small, smooth hand over the cardinal’s. “Tonight, Arturo? It has been too long already.”

“We’ll see, Vittorio. I have a great deal of work to do.”

“I suppose you’re right. I have work to do myself. I have to see Garibaldi.”

“Who is he?” Ruffino asked.

“You don’t want to know. There is still such a thing as plausible deniability.”

“In a Church built on lies and betrayal? The Vatican has less plausible deniability than Richard Nixon ever did.”

“All right. Garibaldi is a member of the Assassini.”

“Good God, I didn’t think they still existed,” said the cardinal.

“There aren’t very many.”

“They are truly assassins still?”

“More like field operatives.”

“Vatican James Bonds?”

“I suppose you could call them that.”

“With licenses to kill.”

“If it comes to that.”