The Templar Conspiracy (12 page)

20

The Maine Mall is a 1,200,000 square foot sprawling shopping complex in the southern part of the city of Portland and is anchored by JCPenney, Sears, Best Buy, Macy’s and Sports Authority. It contains another 140 shops and services, including a food court and several sit-down family restaurants. It is the largest shopping mall in Maine, and more major drug deals are completed here than in any other place in the state, mostly in the food court, particularly the McDonald’s section. The food court is located on the main level at the western, or JCPenney, end of the mall.

Today the blank-faced Chinese group was at Arby’s and the Vietnamese were chowing down on Big Macs. There were four of each, but the principals were obvious. One Vietnamese, a short man in his early twenties, was eating nothing and neither was his Chinese alter ego in the seating section next door. The noise level was deafening, like a Niagara Falls of chatter. Most people avoided sitting near the young Asian men in their black leather jackets, slicked oily hair and opaque or reflective sunglasses. Their privacy was guaranteed.

At an unseen signal the Chinese leader got up from his place, accompanied by one bodyguard. He slipped into the booth occupied by the Vietnamese man. He, too, had a single bodyguard with him. They spoke for a moment, probably in English, although William Tritt couldn’t be sure. He watched from just outside Ben & Jerry’s as the meeting came to an end and the two men shook hands. It was the handshake that gave it away, of course. Hand shaking was distinctly non-Asian and rarely practiced by them except with whites. Ergo it had a purpose, and if you were watching as closely as William Tritt was you would have seen it: two sets of car keys being exchanged. It was the perfect pass over and any narcotics agent arresting either group at this point would find no evidence of any sort of drugs on the men. The keys would have no identifying tags and no electronic beepers. Checking all of the thousands of vehicles in the enormous parking lots surrounding the mall on three sides would be impossible.

The Vietnamese were almost invariably the buyers in situations like this, so when the little party broke up Tritt followed the four Chinese, who were probably collecting the cash. Tritt had no interest in the drugs, whatever they were. They headed for the northwest exit.

The parking lot was a crisscross maze of snow piles and narrow, half-cleared paths. It was snowing now, the blustery wind off the nearby ocean cutting visibility as the fat flakes whirled and danced. The only people in the lot were hurrying either to or from their vehicles. The car was a tan Chevy Impala from the last decade. The leader of the small Chinese group put the key in the trunk lock and opened it. All four men leaned inward to inspect the contents.

A firm believer in simple solutions, Tritt removed the .50-caliber Desert Eagle from the brand-new black nylon sports bag he carried in his left hand, then screwed on the suppressor he took from the pocket of his newly purchased ski jacket from Sears. He had already snapped on surgical gloves as he walked along behind the four Chinese in the mall. From fifteen feet away he shot each of the young men in the base of the spine.

The weapon made a stiff cracking sound like ice breaking underfoot on a frozen pond and the four men dropped to the ground without any other sound. Their heavy jackets soaked up the blood pouring out of the exit wounds in their lower abdomens, so there was very little mess. No one had noticed anything; the piles of snow had acted like sound buffers, stealing away any echo. He dropped the Desert Eagle and the suppressor into the sports bag and zipped it up.

Tritt took one quick look around, then stepped forward. He removed a pair of large, green Samsonite hard-shell suitcases from the trunk, then heaved the bodies of the four dead Chinese into the empty space.

He took the Desert Eagle out of the sports bag a second time and emptied the clip into the bodies, just to make sure. He slammed the trunk closed, took the key out of the lock and put it into his pocket. He slung the sports bag over his left shoulder, picked up a suitcase in each hand and walked back to his rental.

In this weather it would be a while before the bodies in the trunk began to emit an odor, but somewhere along the line the missing money and the absent men would surely be missed. Almost certainly the Chinese murders and the disappearance of the cash would be blamed on the Vietnamese. Maybe the whole episode would turn into a gang war and he’d be instrumental in lowering Portland’s crime rate.

His rental was a black F150 truck equipped with out-sized snow tires, quite a common vehicle in Maine at this time of year. The same people who’d provided the Desert Eagle had also given him a complete identity package for a man named Art Barfield, including various hunting permits, a driver’s license in the same name and a letter of introduction to a radical and obscure paramilitary group named Maine’s Right Arm.

Maine’s Right Arm had a membership of barely twenty active participants. The leader of MRA was Wilmot DeJean and the group was located just outside Arkham, a hamlet in the northwestern part of the state. Arkham was the largest of four villages with a total population of two thousand spread out over forty-one square miles. According to the information Tritt had been given, Wilmot DeJean was a onetime high school teacher offered early retirement for psychiatric reasons.

DeJean apparently had delusions of grandeur of an extreme nature. He used an eagle clutching a swastika as both the symbol of the organization and the tattoo on his right bicep, and he had once been investigated by the Secret Service for writing a threatening letter to the current president. This event was thought to have precipitated his early retirement. The group had been infiltrated by Homeland Security and was deemed to be a minor threat, if a threat at all. The files on both DeJean and the MRA were still open with both Homeland Security and the Secret Service, however.

“We could always just bail on the whole thing,” suggested Peggy as they neared Geneva. It was almost dawn and there was a light snow falling. Both Peggy and Holliday were exhausted after their long drive, and Holliday’s nerves were near the breaking point. “You go back to the university and I’ll go back to Israel. Forget any of it happened.” She lifted her shoulders. “You were right. None of this was our business in the first place.”

“It’s too late for that now,” said Holliday, seated behind the wheel. “We’re the patsies for whatever they have in mind.”

“Which is?” Peggy asked.

“I don’t have the faintest idea,” said Holliday. “I don’t even really know who ‘they’ are. The Vatican? The CIA? Rex Deus and that bitch Sinclair?”

“Maybe all three,” said Peggy. “The Pope gets assassinated because he’s some kind of threat to Brennan and his organization, this rogue element in the CIA is trying to alter the balance of power by getting rid of an administration that’s been trying to marginalize it, and Kate Sinclair gets a shot at putting her son into the White House, or near it.”

“Sounds a little complicated. Don’t you think?” Holliday asked.

“Conspiracies usually are,” answered Peggy. Holliday laughed. He swung the rental down the ramp at the first Geneva exit off the auto route.

“Conspiracies usually don’t exist at all,” he said. “They’re just a lot of Internet fantasies.”

“Tell that to Julius Caesar, or what’s-his-name, the guy with the eye patch like yours, the Nazi Tom Cruise played. He and his buddies tried to blow up Hitler.”

“Von Stauffenberg,” said Holliday.

“A conspiracy only exists when it’s discovered. If it succeeds no one knows it was ever there.”

“Who knows?” Holliday shrugged. “Maybe you’re right.”

“And maybe Tritt left something behind to give us some clue.”

Brennan had run Tritt’s Geneva phone number and the plates on Tritt’s vehicle several days before the rocket attempt on the president, and discovered that the car was registered to a man named Emil Langarotti. Langarotti’s address was given as 1 Rue Henri Frederich Amiel, Apartment 5B. Holliday and Peggy booked themselves back into a suite at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, slept until noon, then headed to Tritt’s pied-à-terre.

The address turned out to be a five-story, peach-colored stucco building just off the Rue des Delices, half a mile or so from their hotel. It was a quiet neighborhood around the corner from a busy thoroughfare and seemed made up almost entirely of buildings like Tritt’s, done in varying pastel shades of stucco.

There was a wide, arched front door, the glass protected by ornamental ironwork. Above the door there was a large, black ONE. From a quick study it looked as though there were six apartments on each floor. Presumably Tritt’s apartment was on the top one. They pulled open the big door and stepped into the building’s lobby. There was a concierge’s cubicle on the right but it was empty. On the left was a brass-doored elevator with a little porthole window. Directly ahead was a narrow flight of winding stairs. They took the coffin-sized elevator that creaked and groaned its way to the top floor. The elevator door opened onto an X-shaped intersection of four short corridors, badly lit by old-fashioned wall sconces. The floors were covered in green institutional carpeting that was stained and worn.

Tritt’s apartment was at the end of the left-hand corridor. The door was brown-painted wood and the lock was a dead bolt.

“How are we supposed to get in?” said Peggy, a slightly sour tone in her voice. “You bring your handy-dandy lock picks with you, by any chance?”

“As a matter of fact I did,” said Holliday. He reached under his jacket and pulled out the tire iron from the rental. The dead bolt was new, but the doorframe was as old as the building. He inserted the chisel end of the tire iron into the frame just above the lock and heaved. There was a sharp cracking sound as the frame around the lock set splintered. The door was open.

“You could patent that,” whispered Peggy. “You could call it E-Z Key.”

Holliday pushed open the door. The apartment was small, a one-bedroom. Two windows looked out onto Rue des Delices but the shutters on both were closed, letting in only slivers of daylight. The main room was anonymous, an Ikea ideal without a hint about the kind of person who lived there. Peggy crossed the old, dark hardwood floor and flipped open the louvers on the shutters. The room brightened. Couch, two bucket armchairs, all red Ikea, a glass-and-steel coffee table with a big glass ashtray. Beside it there was a remote control. A pole lamp in the corner and a small, high-intensity lamp on an end table to the right of the couch. Between the two windows was a modern desk made of some sort of maple veneer and the docking station for a laptop. A giant plasma TV had been installed above the old gas fireplace. To the left of the fireplace was an expensive, sleek Bang & Olufsen media center with a stereo and digital video recorder. Beneath the system was a large, fully filled cabinet of CDs and DVDs.

“Nothing here,” said Holliday. He went down a short hall, heading for the bedroom. Peggy stayed in the main room and crouched down, investigating Tritt’s taste in movies and music. Holliday returned a few minutes later, a sour expression on his face. “Not a thing,” he said. “The man’s a ghost. It’s even more sterile than the place in Lyford Cay.”

“Strauss, Wagner, Mozart, Verdi, Beethoven, Vivaldi, Susan Boyle.” Peggy was still kneeling in front of the rack of CDs and DVDs.

“I beg your pardon?”

“It’s almost all classical except for the Susan Boyle.”

“Who in hell is Susan Boyle?” Holliday asked.

“You’re kidding, right?” Peggy stood up. She opened the plastic case and put in the Susan Boyle disc.

“Never heard of her,” said Holliday.

“You’ve really got to get out more, Doc,” Peggy said with a grin, shaking her head. She crossed the room to the coffee table, picked up the remote and pressed the power button. Nothing happened for a second and then the huge TV over the fireplace flickered into life. A grainy image appeared of a man standing in what appeared to be some sort of derelict summer camp, an AK-47 cradled in his arms. The image was saturated with color almost to the point of being garish, and Holliday instantly thought of old home movies shot on Super 8 film. An amateurish title appeared over the figure of the man with the classic Soviet assault rifle:

YOU AND MAINE’S RIGHT ARM

Below the title was a crude drawing of a screaming eagle clutching a bloodred swastika.

“What the fuck?” said Peggy.

“I’ll tell you one thing: it sure as hell isn’t Kansas anymore, Toto,” answered Holliday.

21

The Maine’s Right Arm Camp had formerly been known as Camp O-Pem-I-Gon, a two-hundred-acre tract on the shores of Lake Watson purchased by the Boy Scouts of America in 1922. That camp ceased operation during the 1960s for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was the fact that any twelve- or thirteen-year-old boy in 1965 wouldn’t have been caught dead in a Boy Scout uniform.

In the early seventies a man named Reinhold Hodge tried to develop the entire lake as cottage lots. The Boy Scouts had chosen their wedge of property at the end of Eagle Road, the only property that wasn’t swampy, mosquito infested or solid bedrock with no possibility of ever having anything except outdoor privies for sanitation. Hodge began by offering the lots at $2,500 apiece, went bankrupt by the time they were knocked down to $500 and left town when they hit $300 without a single lot sold.

In the end Wilmot DeJean purchased the entire lake, including the old Boy Scout camp, for $10,000 from the bankruptcy trustees in 1989, with the intention of changing the name of the property to the Light of the Lord Boys’ Camp. As a result of the nebulous mental health problem that sent him into early retirement in 1991, the boys’ camp idea was never brought to fruition.

By the mid-nineties DeJean finally found his niche. With the Russkies and the commies out of the picture, and the hippies all working on Wall Street or running health-food conglomerates and computer corporations, DeJean reinvented the old enemies that America needed so badly.

In his new world order, the ills of society were all caused by those good old standbys: the blacks, the Jews and the fags. On top of that he threw in wetbacks sneaking over the border to steal jobs, and just about anyone who spoke a foreign language. Not surprisingly, it worked like a charm.

There wasn’t a single black family in Arkham, nor a Hispanic one. If there were any gays they weren’t talking, and the nearest synagogue was three hundred miles away. DeJean’s original screed sheet,
The Eagle’s Voice,
had secret subscriptions from about a hundred people in the area, and DeJean, no slouch, was an early user of the Internet. His Web site drew in even more subscriptions.

Within a year after 9/11, subscriptions to the renamed
Eagle of Truth
had jumped to more than ten thousand, giving the sixty-six-year-old DeJean a comfortable enough living and enough funds to start bringing the old Boy Scout camp back to life.

By 2003 DeJean was having regular rallies at the old camp, drawing people from all over Maine. By 2006 he was having three summer sessions a year, with people coming to the camp from all over the country.

By 2008 DeJean had recruited twenty-three full-time “Patriots,” none over the age of thirty. Several of them were ex-military and had done tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. Four others had done time in various penal facilities, and each and every one of them enthusiastically shared DeJean’s hatred of just about every minority you could name.

There had been very little in the news cycle about militia groups for some time, the Oklahoma City bombing having been trumped by the destruction of the World Trade Center. Ruby Ridge was a distant memory, and the Branch Davidians an embarrassing stain on the reputations of both the ATF and the FBI. America had a new enemy now, and Al-Qaeda and the Taliban were stealing DeJean’s thunder. As the news media shifted their focus to other stories, subscriptions, income and interest began to drift away.

Senator Sinclair’s strident warnings about the enemy within and the potential threat of domestic terrorism helped somewhat, especially with young Muslims sneaking off to Pakistan on spring break to be all that they could be for Osama, and blanket bombs on flights to Detroit, but it wasn’t enough. The sudden appearance of Billy Tritt and his two suitcases at the Eagle’s Nest, as it was now called, was a godsend.

It was also a bit of an anticlimax. As Tritt approached the camp entrance along the dusty, aptly named Eagle Road, he saw that DeJean had never bothered to take down the rustic Camp O-Pem-I-Gon wooden archway over the entrance, simply replacing the Boy Scout fleurde-lis in the center with a red, black and yellow plywood rendition of his screaming eagle and swastika symbol.

Security consisted of an overweight and pimple-faced man in his late twenties dozing on a stump with a cigarette drooping out of the corner of his mouth. He was wearing jeans and a down coat, which bore the screaming eagle logo. He had what appeared to be a Kalashnikov AK-47 across his lap, but as Tritt pulled the truck to a stop and the pimple-faced idiot stood up, he saw that it was a .22-caliber German knockoff. In Pimple Face’s big hands it looked like a toy, which was, effectively, what it was.

“Outa the truck,” said Pimple Face, gesturing with the rifle, stepping forward. He was wearing scuffed high-tops. Some uniform. Tritt could see the long lever safety was blocking the breech. It would take the oafish young man a good second to thumb it off and then charge the weapon by pulling back the bolt.

“Put it away,” said Tritt, pulling the big Desert Eagle out from under his Windbreaker.

Pimple Face stared at the gleaming handgun and fumbled with the safety on the baby AK. From the driver’s seat, Tritt shot him in the foot, blowing off the front of one of the old, floppy sneakers. The young man screamed, his howl lost in the booming echo of the big automatic as it rumbled around the surrounding cedar-clad hills. Pimple Face dropped to the ground, screaming, blood pumping out of his ruined foot. Tears poured down his fat cheeks. The blood from his foot congealed in the snow like cat crap in a litter box.

“You shooted me!” moaned the fat young man, writhing in the dirt.

“No, I shot you,” said Tritt, staring down at him from the truck. “And I’ll shoot you in the other foot unless you tell me where DeJean is within the next ten seconds.”

“Up to the communications center,” groaned the young man, his teeth gritted with pain. The blood still poured into the snow. He was losing a lot of blood and he was going pale. Tritt recognized the signs of shock.

“Where’s that?” Tritt asked.

“Up ta the lodge. By the tennis courts,” grunted Pimple Face. He was looking nauseated now, flop sweat running down his jawline.

“You’re going to pass out in a second. You might puke, so make sure you’re on your side. Don’t worry. I’ll send someone down to patch you up when I find DeJean.”

“You bastid, you shooted me,” whispered Pimple Face, snot streaming from his nostrils in two gleaming snail trails. His eyes rolled back and he faded out. He was rolled into a fetal ball, his back against the stump. The blood kept coming. He’d need a hospital soon or he’d lose the foot. Fortunes of war, thought Tritt. He put the big black truck into drive and rolled slowly up the road.

There was an old tumbledown log building on the crest of a low rise on his left and an open field with what looked like a giant plywood tepee in the center of the clearing. The tepee was stained and weathered, tilting slightly to the right, painted Indian symbols almost completely faded away by time and the elements. The field was snow covered, but Tritt could still see the raised wooden tent platforms. He passed an old gravel parking area. There were half a dozen vehicles, mostly trucks, mostly old and all American made, parked.

Standing on its own as though the other vehicles didn’t want to chance scratching the paint was a bright red army surplus Humvee. Driving past, Tritt read the license plate on the back of the brutal-looking vehicle: PATRIOT. Not difficult to figure out who owned it. Beyond the parking lot on a ridge overlooking the lake was a large, rough log structure with a snowy roof. There were two flags on the wooden pole in front of the lodge: DeJean’s screaming eagle riding above Maine’s moose and pine tree.

Tritt parked the big truck in front of the building, putting the Desert Eagle back in the vertical sling holster under his nylon Windbreaker. He walked up a rickety flight of steps onto the wide, covered porch and rapped on the flimsy wooden door. A few seconds later the door was opened by a man wearing civilian clothes and a screaming eagle armband.

His hands were grimy, the nails thickly rimmed with grease, and there were long grease stains on his work pants. He was wearing heavy construction boots. He looked to be in his early twenties. A car mechanic, perhaps, or somebody who worked with machinery.

Behind him half a dozen people sat around a long, ersatz conference table made from two sheets of plywood supported on wooden trestles. The plywood had been covered with dark green oilcloth. There were six men of various sizes and ages standing around the roughly made conference table. Tritt was reminded of von Stauffenberg and the plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler. Hitler was in the room, too, in the form of a large, framed portrait over the mantel of a big fieldstone fireplace at the far end. Unlike any conference room of Hitler’s, however, the room was thick with smoke, clouds of it rolling up to the rough-log ceiling beams.

“Who are you?” The man at the door said. “Whadda you want here? This is private property.” He scowled. “Why didn’t Skinny stop you like he’s supposed to?”

“Skinny, wearing one of those screaming eagle coats? Fat, lots of zits?”

“Yeah.”

“He’s down at the gate, lying on the ground with half his foot blown off.”

“Shit,” said the man at the door.

“Yeah, maybe that, too,” said Tritt.

Another voice spoke up. This time it came from a short man standing at the head of the table. He was dressed in full desert camo and wearing a Fidel Castro-style green, flattop cap with two stars on it. Like the man at the door he was wearing a screaming eagle armband. There was a huge screaming eagle banner on the wall to one side of the table that bore Maine’s Right Arm’s motto: THE RIGHT ARM IS GOD’S ARM.

“You shot one of my men?” asked the man in the camo gear. Tritt noticed that he was wearing a sidearm. It looked like an old Colt auto.

“That’s right.” Tritt nodded. “And if you don’t get someone down there in a hurry he’s going to bleed to death. Take him to a hospital and tell the doctors he shot himself in the foot. He looks stupid enough.”

“Daniel?”

The man standing in front of Tritt nodded at the man with the stars on his kepi and hurried past Tritt.

“You must be DeJean.”

The man nodded. “I am Colonel DeJean, yes.” He stepped out from behind the table, one hand on the butt of his open-holstered automatic. The holster was scarred and battered. War surplus. Tritt saw that he was wearing expensive-looking cowboy boots. The heels gave him at least two extra inches.

“In whose army?” Tritt responded belligerently.

DeJean’s hand tightened on the butt of his weapon. “Mine,” he said finally.

“This bunch? The fat guy at the gate? You must be joking.”

“There are others,” said DeJean. Under the cap, white, fluffy hair extended. “This is merely a training session for new recruits.”

“Training for what?” Tritt asked. “The circus?”

“They laughed at Hitler in the beginning,” said DeJean. “As far as the British were concerned George Washington was a traitor and Benedict Arnold was a great war hero.”

Tritt laughed. “You’re comparing yourself to Hitler and George Washington? Hitler was a madman and Washington was a career soldier from the age of twenty.”

“I prefer to know with whom I am debating,” said DeJean, drawing himself up stiffly.

“My name is Barfield,” said Tritt.

“What exactly is it that you want, Mr. Barfield? The Eagle’s Nest is a little out of the way for idle conversation.”

“I’m here to make a donation to your cause.”

“We don’t take checks, I’m afraid.” DeJean smirked.

“Send one of your boys out to my truck. There are a couple of suitcases on the passenger’s seat. Bring them here.”

“Pritchard, Samson, get the suitcases,” DeJean ordered. Two of the men standing at the big plywood table headed for the door. They were back two minutes later, each one carrying a suitcase.

“Put them on the table,” said Tritt. He reached into his pocket and threw a ring of small keys in DeJean’s direction. He tried to scoop them out of the air with one hand but they fell at his feet. One of his “trainees” bent to pick them up and handed them over. The men put the suitcases on the table. DeJean dismissed them.

DeJean gave Tritt a long look, then fitted the keys into the locks of the big green suitcases. He threw back the lids. Each suitcase contained hundreds of pressure-wrapped bricks of used cash. DeJean tried not to look surprised, but Tritt could see his hands shaking slightly as he reached for one of the bricks and pulled it out.

“Uh, this is very generous of you Mr., uh . . . Barfield. Might I ask where it came from?”

“This isn’t quite a donation, Colonel DeJean. It’s a buyout. Maine’s Right Arm is now mine to do with as I want. Your men will now follow my orders and only mine. Understand?”

“You must be crazy. This is a grassroots political movement. This is a cause!”

“Bullshit.”

DeJean looked down at the immense amount of cash.

“There’s slightly over two million dollars there, all in untraceable bills.”

“Why are you doing this?” DeJean asked.

“September eleventh was a wakeup call to America,” said Tritt, reciting the carefully written script he’d been given and which he’d memorized. A script written to ease DeJean’s conscience and excuse his greed. “But that was nearly ten years ago, and this great country has fallen into a complacent slumber once more. It’s time America was roused from its dangerous sleep. The men of Maine’s Right Arm can be the ones to do just that.”

“How?” DeJean said.

“By doing exactly as I tell them,” said Tritt. He watched as DeJean stared down at the suitcases. He could almost see the wheels turning in the old man’s head. Those suitcases were the stuff of pipe dreams and DeJean had been living in a pipe dream world for much of his adult life. He and Maine’s Right Arm were the perfect thing for what was to come.

DeJean drew himself to a soldierly attention. “Mr. Barfield, Maine’s Right Arm is yours to command. May God bless your endeavors, and may God bless America.”