Templar 09 - Secret of the Templars (10 page)

Enoch Snow slipped his master key card into the lock on Holliday's door in the Best Western on Palm Beach Lakes Boulevard. The lock clicked, the light turned green and the door opened. Snow stepped inside and walked to the sitting room of the suite. It was like any other high-end suite—bland, yet well proportioned and well laid out. Matching small tables flanked the couch. There were two lamps and two matching paintings above the sofa. Beside the couch there was an oversized club chair. Behind it was a wooden desk. The whole room was dominated by a large plasma-screen TV. The carpet was a neutral gray broadloom.

Snow crossed the room and put the small black suitcase he was carrying onto the desk. He looked around the room, trying to imagine how it would be.

Finding Holliday, Lazarus and Kruger had been a relatively easy task in Manhattan. Snow was on good terms with the young woman in the main Visa offices and she readily gave him the tracking code he could use to follow Holliday's economic trail.

From the Holiday Inn he'd followed their car rental and their gasoline purchases all the way down to Palm Beach. Snow had been in the Denny's at the same time they were having breakfast. Finishing his cup of coffee, he made his way to their hotel. Twenty years earlier, that kind of surveillance would have been impossible for a man like him, but computers, not to mention simple greed, had made the entire process remarkably easy.

He dialed the combination on the suitcase lock and flipped it open. Inside, packed in hard foam, was a bomb maker's traveling kit. It included a kilo of Semtex sealed in a lead-lined aluminum foil pouch, making it odorless, non-gas-emitting and effectively invisible to most security procedures. Also packed was an assortment of fuses, timing devices and several untraceable cell phones. He broke the seal of the Semtex package, tore off approximately half the Plasticine-like substance and began molding it into the shape and size of a child's red rubber ball.

*   *   *

Vijay Sen, still dressed in the filthy clothes he had worn the night before and which in fact were the only clothes he owned, stood shuffling his bare feet on the thick carpet in Kota Raman's office.

“I could have you killed. You know that, don't you, slumdog?”

“Yes,” mumbled Vijay.

“But you are not afraid,” replied Raman. “Why is that?”

“I have nothing so I have nothing to fear,” answered Vijay.

“Wise philosophy for a slumdog.”

“The only one for a slumdog to have,” said Vijay, a trace of a smile appearing on his lips.

“You don't deny that you broke into my yard and killed my dog and my watchman?”

“No, sir,” said Vijay. “I killed them both. I broke into your yard and I opened the gates.”

“Why did you do this?” Raman asked.

“Because the Bapat people paid me a thousand rupees to do so,” Vijay said plainly.

The Rohit Bapat family was Raman's equal in Mumbai but their influence only reached the borders of the immense city. The Bapat had risen from the slums, the same slums that Vijay had come from, and the stain of his upbringing hung
to him like inescapable chains. He was blunt, stupid and used violence rather than any kind of intelligence to achieve his goals. This was the first time in Raman's experience that Bapat had ever attacked him directly.

“Which of Bapat's people in particular came to you?” Raman asked.

“Bobby Dhaliwal.”

Raman leaned back in his chair. Bobby Dhaliwal was one of Bapat's most effective soldiers. He was an old-fashioned Thuggee dressed in silks and leathers like a Bollywood film star. His trademark was a pair of giant mirrored aviator sunglasses. It was said that if Dhaliwal removed his sunglasses and you saw his eyes, it would be the last thing you ever saw. Oddly, Raman knew for a fact that Dhaliwal was a
pakoli
—that is, gay as a songbird twittering in the trees. If Bapat ever discovered this, he would lop off Dhaliwal's head.

“Interesting,” said Raman. “Why are you telling me this?”

“Because when your people found me, I knew you would kill me one way or the other. Telling you or not telling you makes no difference except that if I didn't tell you you would torture me until I did and then kill me.” Vijay shrugged.

Raman sat forward in his chair, his hands clasped together. “What is your name, slumdog?”

“Vijay,” said the fourteen-year-old.

“How would you like to work for me?” Raman said, with his best fatherly smile.

*   *   *

The remaining members of the CIA's ghost unit once again sat in the safe house on Fort Myer Drive and once again Rusty Smart looked concerned.

“Kitchen is worried about a mole in Leonardo and we all know what that means. Have we heard from Blackthorn?”

Streeter shook his head. “Not a word, but the man we put on him saw somebody interesting going into the New York offices of Blackthorn and Cole. He took a photograph of him and we ran it through every database we have access to.”

“Who is it?” Smart asked.

Streeter swiveled around in his chair and punched up the photograph and an identification panel beside it. “His name is Enoch Snow. Born in Belfast right at the height of the Troubles.” Streeter turned back to the screen again. “At the age of fourteen he shot and killed a member of the Royal Ulster Constabulary but his pals in the IRA managed to spirit him out of Northern Ireland before the RUC tossed him into Long Kesh. Ten years later he resurfaced with the
assassination of a high-ranking member of the Unione Corse. From then on he reappears with regularity as a hired assassin all over the world, sometimes bombs, sometimes shootings, with the occasional slit throat thrown in for good measure. The guy is a sociopath—a stone-cold killer.”

Rusty lit a cigarette. “So presumably Blackthorn has hired him to nail Holliday and his pals. Shit.” He shook his head. “One more monkey wrench into the works. Somehow we have to get to Holliday first, which means we'll have to get rid of this man Snow in the process. This whole thing is turning into a shitstorm. If we don't, the whole Leonardo project is going to be compromised, maybe even blown. The very fact that Kitchen thinks he has a mole is bad enough. But if he gets to Holliday before we do, we're dead men. And frankly, I'd like to continue living a little while longer.”

*   *   *

Holliday, Lazarus and Kruger got off the elevator and walked down the carpeted hallway to their hotel suite. Holliday paused in front of the door, the card key poised over the lock. He stopped and crouched down, his eyes scanning the floor at the base of the door. In a variation on the old James Bond hair-in-the-crack trick,
earlier that day he'd spit-glued a small black piece of paper from a magazine onto the corner of the doorframe. The paper was gone. He stood, thinking hard. He turned to Lazarus and Hannah, a finger to his lips.

“Wait,” he said. He pushed the key card into the lock and went inside, leaving the door open behind him. He walked down the short hallway and stood looking into the sitting room. He let his eyes wander over the room, looking for anything that shouldn't be there or things that should be there but weren't. He scanned the room a second time and caught it. There had been a chip in the ornate frame of the picture over the left side of the couch. The chipped frame was now on the right. One thing led to another. The indentations of the legs on the couch were fractionally out of alignment. He stepped slowly backward and rejoined Lazarus and Hannah out in the hall. “Somebody's been in the room. There are a few things off-kilter. Wait here while I check it out.”

“Is it Blackthorn or somebody else?” Lazarus asked.

“Hard to tell at this point,” answered Holliday. “I'll let you know in minute.”

Holliday went back into the sitting room once again, leaving the door open behind him. He took the painting off the right side of the wall and
flipped it over. He immediately saw a small black box and a six-inch dangling wire. He carefully put the painting back on the wall. He went to the left-side painting and repeated the process. Another transmitter and wire. He hung the painting back on the wall and looked around the room again. The only other logical place for another bug was under the table. He crossed the room, went to the table, crouched down and looked beneath it. There was no transmitter. Smiling, he pulled out the chair and there it was: the third bug.

The room had been thoroughly bugged. But why? Anybody on his trail already had all the information they needed. There had to be something else going on. He stood and turned around. Why had the couch been moved?

He crossed to it and carefully lifted off the pillows. Nothing. Then he noticed a surgical split in the fabric covering the springs. He peered inside and saw the familiar shape of a small plastic pressure plate, its wires leading down to a spot underneath the couch. He found an identical switch in the fabric under the other pillow.

Walking with extreme care, Holliday backed away. He went down the hallway again and motioned for Lazarus to join him, then whispered as
softly as he could into his ear, “Pressure switch. Bugs.”

Lazarus nodded.

The two men stepped into the room. Holliday pointed toward the couch and Lazarus nodded again. They stepped forward and Holliday pointed out the familiar switches he'd seen so many times in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Holliday leaned forward and grabbed the back of the couch on the right side while Lazarus stepped up and grabbed the left. Very gently they eased the couch forward so that it was lying on its back. On the floor directly below the couch, where the couch had stood, there was a lump of plastic explosive wired to both the pressure switches and a cell phone.

Holliday motioned for Lazarus to step back. The two men eased their way out of the room and went out into the hallway yet again.

“Are you carrying a cell phone?” Holliday asked.

“Yes,” Lazarus said.

“Is the GPS turned on?”

“Certainly not.” Lazarus seemed a little angry.

“Good,” said Holliday. “Crack it open and give me the chip.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I'm going to take apart the bomb,” replied Holliday.

“I'm going with you,” said Lazarus.

“No, you're not,” said Holliday. “It's far too dangerous.”

“If I don't come with you, you don't get the chip.”

“This is not the time for goddamn heroics,” said Holliday. “Don't be an idiot.”

“I'm not trying to be a hero and I'm not an idiot. It just makes good sense. You may need an extra hand in there.”

Holliday thought for a moment. Lazarus was probably right. “All right. Let's go.”

“So I'm supposed to stand here in the hall singing German beer hall songs?” Hannah said.

“You're more important than either of us. You know more about this whole business than we do. If that thing in there goes off, you run like hell to the nearest FBI office and spill your guts.”

Hannah didn't look happy about it, but she nodded.

The two men went back in the room.

“Good luck,” Hannah whispered.

The two men reached the end of the short hallway and Holliday paused again. He slipped off his shoes and Lazarus followed suit. Once again he
gestured for silence. He had now figured out why the room had been bugged. Whoever was after them needed to know that they were all in the same room together before he triggered the bomb. The killer was clearly a very careful man. The pressure plates would have been enough, but he had a fallback trigger with the cell phone. If they made too much noise and alerted the killer, he would dial the cell phone. The tiny current from the ringtone would be enough to set off the explosive. They were going to have to do this very quickly.

Using a thumbnail, thick and calloused by his many years of being a soldier, Holliday began to crack open the lethal cell phone. Out of nowhere came the bellowing, screaming siren of a fire engine followed immediately by the electric wail of an ambulance. Holliday froze for an instant, the faceplate of the cell phone half open and half closed above the mechanism below. He took a deep breath, waited until the sound had faded and then removed the faceplate. He immediately pulled the chip and replaced it with the one Lazarus had given him. As he did so, he gestured to his companion to simultaneously pull the wires leading from the pressure plates. Holliday grabbed the now inert ball of plastic explosive in his hand and stood up.

He spoke loudly, “I spy with my little eye a
bomb that doesn't work anymore. Whoever you are, you screwed up big time.” Holliday took the ball of explosive to the desk, flipped over the chair and removed the transmitter. He stuffed it into his pocket and crossed to the two paintings and removed both of the transmitters. With the other two transmitters in his hand, he went through to the suite's bathroom, ripped the wires out and flushed all three transmitters down the toilet. He went back into the sitting room.

“That was interesting,” said Lazarus. “I thought I was going to wet my pants there for a moment. How many of those things have you defused?”

“Actually,” said Holliday, “that was my first time. We had a course on it behind the wall in Baghdad, but that's about it.”

“Mother of God,” Lazarus whispered.

It took Holliday and his companions exactly seven and a half minutes to check out of the Best Western; Holliday timed it with his wristwatch. Driving the rental, they headed toward the restored Spanish colonial Amtrak station on Tamarind Street. Holliday made a stop along the way at a Chase Bank to get twenty-five thousand dollars off his American Express Centurion card.

As with all of his credit cards, he had received the Centurion card using the old notebook he'd been given by the monk Rodrigues. The manager of the bank, a Mr. Harold Bloom, although quite used to platinum cards, had never seen one of the rare black cards when he came out to do Holliday's banking for him.

“Are you enjoying our little town?” Bloom asked.

“A bit hot for me,” Holliday answered.

“May I inquire why you need such a large amount of cash?” Bloom asked. He kept smiling, but that kind of cash usually went along with either drugs or money laundering, and carrying this kind of transaction on his books might very easily tinkle a few federal bells he didn't want tinkled. Bloom wasn't so much a stickler for rigid banking practices as he was for keeping some of his wealthy but less than palatable clients happy.

“Sure.” Holliday smiled pleasantly. He knew exactly what the bank manager was thinking. “I'm going to a particular destination that doesn't take credit cards of any kind.”

Bloom nodded. Cuba. Now it made sense. “I see,” said the bank manager. “I'd be happy to get the cash for you myself.”

“I'd love to come with you,” said Holliday. “I've never really seen the inside of a bank vault before.” The only way to ensure that Bloom didn't run off to make a phone call to the local FBI was by accompanying him.

“I'm sure that's not true,” said Bloom coyly, “but by all means, follow me.”

They went to the vault in the basement of the bank and Bloom chose two banded ten-thousand-dollar bricks and broke the band on a third brick, then counted out another five thousand dollars from it. The manager found a bank envelope and
slipped the money inside. They went back upstairs, where Holliday signed the requisite forms and Bloom finally handed him the money. Their cat-and-mouse game over, Holliday shook hands with Bloom and left the bank.

They carried on to the large pink-stuccoed train station surrounded by large beautiful palm trees and went inside. Holliday bought three tickets for the short trip to Miami. They went to the waiting room and sat down.

“Now what?” said Hannah.

“Yes, now what?” Lazarus said.

“I've got a plan,” said Holliday.

“Do tell,” said Lazarus.

*   *   *

Enoch Snow was furious. Holliday had outthought him at every point along the way. He'd listened to Holliday's teasing on the FM receiver. He waited in his room three floors above and thought furiously. He'd clearly made some kind of mistake that had alerted Holliday or one of his companions and now he was paying for it. He went to his suitcase, took out a Beretta 92FS and screwed a suppressor onto the tapped muzzle. He popped the magazine, checked that it was loaded and slammed it back into the grip. He pumped the slide once, ensuring that there was a cartridge
up the spout. Snow left the room with the pistol held in his right hand and hidden under his jacket. He walked down the hallway to the stairwell and made his way carefully down the three flights that would put him on Holliday's floor. He reached Holliday's suite, took out his master key card and slipped it into the lock. Snow then tapped the door slightly open with his foot. He stood, all of his well-honed senses hard at work. All he could feel was emptiness behind and failure beyond the slightly opened door. Using the splayed fingers of his left hand, he pushed the door fully open and stepped inside, but he was already sure it was too late. He took the silenced pistol from under the coat and with a two-handed grip he moved quietly down the little hallway. He stepped into the sitting room and took in the overturned couch and the paintings lying on the floor. He had failed and now it was too late.

“Fecking hell,” said Enoch Snow.

*   *   *

It was eight twenty in the evening, dusk quickly turning to full night. Holliday, Lazarus and Kruger sat in the rental car directly across from the Bingham Gallery. Holliday took the ball of Semtex out of his pocket and tore it in half. He sniffed. It was odd that the bomber had chosen such an
exotic plastic explosive. The Czech-made explosive was usually confined to use in Eastern Europe and sometimes by terrorists in Paris and London. The only thing this told Holliday was that the bomber in the hotel room was probably European. An American killer would more likely have used C-4 or any one of the dozens of DuPont products, all of which were readily available on the black market.

Holliday formed half of the Semtex ball into a palm-sized pancake roughly half an inch thick. He took the assassin's jury-rigged cell phone trigger, inserted a small wire into the pancake and folded the plastic explosive up around the phone. He casually climbed out of the rental, walked across the street and slapped his little package just above the lock on the front door. Just as casually he turned around and walked back to the car and sat down. He took his own cell phone out of his pocket and handed it to Lazarus, who was beside him in the passenger seat.

“Dial yourself,” said Holliday.

“What then?” asked Hannah, sitting in the back.

“Duck,” said Holliday. “But roll down your window first.” With all four windows lowered Lazarus dialed his own phone number, its chip now in the assassin's trigger mechanism. They all ducked. The response to his call took as long as
it took for the signal to bounce up to the nearest cell tower and down again to the object on the Bingham Gallery door.

The shock wave of the Semtex's detonation was enough to lift the left side wheels of the rental car a foot into the air and set off every car alarm for blocks. As the rental car rocked back to an upright position, there was a furious fireball that reached out to the middle of the street before it back-drafted into the interior of the gallery.

“Go!” Holliday ordered, his voice booming. They all tumbled from the car and ran toward the cavernous opening where the doorway to the Bingham Gallery had once been.

Holliday's plan had been simple and direct. It was unlikely that the West Palm Beach Police Department had either a bomb squad or anything else capable of dealing with a large explosion. They'd probably spend time talking to public works about gas mains before dispatching a fire truck and a squad car or two. He prayed that the cops' response time would leave them a window to get in and out of the Bingham Gallery and back to the train station before all hell broke loose.

Ignoring the ruined interior of the gallery, all three of them headed for the now shattered glass door leading to the stairway up to the office area.
They worked as quickly as they could, gathering up paperwork and ledgers. Holliday used his foot to smash in a locked fire drawer in what had to be Bingham's desk and scooped up two long, slim ledgers.

“I think this is it,” he said. “Time's up.”

He gathered up the ledgers and pushed Lazarus and Hannah toward the stairway, following close behind. As they stumbled over the debris in the gallery, Holliday could hear the distant sound of sirens. They raced out of the gallery, crossed the street and jumped back in the car, dropping everything onto the floor. Holliday eased out of the parking spot and drove away.

*   *   *

His name was Jean-Pierre Devaux, his surname attached to the Templar Order for the better part of a thousand years. A Devaux had been one of the founding members of the order and there had been a Devaux instrumental in the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, one of which lay partially open on the table in his laboratory.

Devaux's laboratory was his own. He had no connection to any university, and he would never have called himself a scholar. In fact, Devaux was an archaeologist for hire, a profession that was becoming more and more common in these
modern times. Private archaeologists were thriving, giving developers clearance from any possible connection to Indian tribes, sacred burial grounds or any other historical reason for a large development to be stalled. Devaux's part of that professional circle was an elite one: he verified and authenticated stolen historical artifacts from around the world. And for this, he was remarkably well paid.

His laboratory was in his home, a large apartment on Avenue de Wagram, one block from the Arc de Triomphe, seven stories above a bar with the unlikely name of Le Paradis du Fruit.

It had taken him almost a year to unroll the scroll, which revealed four pages of the faint Aramaic script. As any archaeologist would, he photographed every tiny section of the scroll as it was revealed with a regular digital camera and an ultraviolet fluorescent camera. By the time a large section had been unrolled, he had brought over his portable X-ray unit and filmed it a third time. As the sections were unrolled, a long, absolutely smooth plate of Plexiglas moved on rollers on the table immediately covering and protecting each new section. It was a tedious business, but it was Devaux's philosophy that things should be done well or not at all.

He stood up, arched his back and sighed. He
was getting too old for this kind of thing. Although never a professor, he did have a professorial look about him. He was a thin man in his late fifties, and his graying brown hair was balding into a large half-moon above his forehead. He wore old-fashioned wire-rimmed spectacles that continually slipped down his nose until he'd begun to wear a small piece of white adhesive tape as a brake. He had never married and had never been tempted.

Life for Jean-Pierre Devaux was a never-ending series of projects. He took two vacations a year: one to the Costa del Sol in Spain and one to Las Vegas. On the Costa del Sol, he tanned himself on the beaches and enjoyed the spectacular food. In Las Vegas, he enjoyed the spectacular women, as many as he could absorb in a ten-day visit. Refreshed in both cases, he would return to work, his true passion.

The scroll in front of him was certainly authentic enough, although not terribly revealing. The four pages so far were nothing but a long-winded, elaborate introduction to the real meat of the scroll that was promised to come. On the other hand, the mention on several occasions of Yeshua ben Yosef, which translated to “Jesus, son of Joseph”—now commonly known as Jesus Christ—was certainly interesting. He had also
uncovered the line “The King of the Jews is dead. The Messiah is risen in the East.”

One of the most fascinating things about the quotation was that the present owner of the scroll came from India, a man named Kota Raman. Having done a great deal of research, as he did for all his clients, buyer or seller, he knew that Raman almost certainly had not obtained the scroll in any legitimate way. Devaux, of course, couldn't have given a damn either way. His entire career had teetered on the edge of crime for almost three decades and he was used to walking the razor's edge.

The scroll was in limbo. The group trying to purchase it had made an offer that he had passed on to Raman for consideration. The price offered had been almost beyond comprehension. But how much would you expect to pay for a Dead Sea Scroll, especially one that mentioned Christ and the Messiah rising in the East? It didn't matter to Devaux. What mattered was that if he authenticated and brokered the scroll to its new owner, his commission of ten percent would keep him in the lap of luxury for the rest of his life. Even more important to Devaux was the fact that his part in selling such a marvelous artifact would make him a piece of history. He smiled, staring down at the stitched piece of
two-thousand-year-old cured, scraped sheepskin parchment in front of him. It did wonders for one's ego.

*   *   *

Unlike Raman, Rohit Bapat never stayed in one place for more than one or two nights. He could have occupied any of the high-rise apartment buildings in Mumbai, but he chose not to—and for good reason. A great deal of the Bapats' revenue came from their control of the building industry. The family had long before infiltrated the tradesmen union, the construction unions and even the loose organization of monkey boys who ran up and down the frighteningly high bamboo scaffolding that was used instead of cranes. The monkey boys hauled everything up by hand, floor after floor. Bapat would no more live in the penthouse apartment of any of these buildings than walk across Niagara Falls on a tightrope. Bapat of all people knew that the Mumbai building codes were covered in the dust of bad cement, bribes, subgrade materials of all kinds and general neglect. Architects on file were generally fictitious and the engineers involved in putting the buildings up were often educated only in a technical college, if that.

Instead Bapat and his entourage of bodyguards and family members would rove through
Mumbai occupying a variety of houses, small family hotels and other residences, all of which they owned and operated. Bapat's most deeply held philosophy was to build his riches in small increments, one rupee at a time, just like the monkey boys and their buckets. It was an intelligent enough way to think in a city of twenty million. But Bapat had what could be called a fatal flaw. He was terribly envious. He envied Kota Raman's wealth and status among the crime families of India, and was wildly jealous of the man's enormous international reach. Somewhere in his small mind he knew that he could never quite attain such heights, but he knew he could destroy him. This was the reason for his first small attack on Raman.

Today's location for the Bapat traveling headquarters was in a small tumbledown hotel in central Mumbai. Bapat now generally used the building as a storage locker for stolen electronic goods, but today he'd taken it over for his own personal use. He sat in what had once been a Raj-style dining room, eating a meal of a Bombay sandwich, butter chicken and several Kingfisher lagers. Bobby Dhaliwal entered the room in all his glittering glory, which included a vastly oversized red leather jacket. He had Vijay Sen by the scruff of his neck.