The Templar Conspiracy (19 page)

PART FOUR

FINALE

31

The Abbey School in Winter Falls predated the entire concept of tourism, and had been established in the early 1800s by a group of monks fleeing from the charred remains of what had once been the Petit Clairvaux Abbey in France. Over the previous centuries Petit Clairvaux had been ravaged by everything from plague and murderous kings to the destruction of the Templar Order, Napoleon Bonaparte’s distaste for the monastic life and organized religion in general, and finally by fire.

The twelve remaining monks set sail for the new world, found an out-of-the-way spot in the forests of New Hampshire and settled down to a contemplative life and the making of cheese from sheep’s milk.

Unfortunately the rich, smoky cheese they produced proved to be unpopular, and by the early 1900s St. Joseph’s Abbey transformed itself into a tuberculosis sanitarium and survived as such until most of the monks and their patients died during the deadly second wave of the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918.

In 1920 the Abbey transformed itself once again and became the Abbey School, a Catholic boarding school with the explicit mandate to produce priests and monks who would extend the Benedictine creed in America. That didn’t work any better than the sheep’s milk cheese, and in 1930, as Winter Falls itself became a popular summer retreat for the rich and powerful, the Abbey School, by now a sprawling compound of hundred-year-old buildings and more modern structures, opened its doors to the children of anyone with the means to pay the hefty tuition and boarding fees, regardless of race, creed or color—with the exception of members of the Negro race, the Chinese and above all members of the Jewish faith. It was, in fact, relentlessly male, white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant for the next half a century.

During those fifty years the Abbey School attained a certain level of prominence as a prep school where A-list celebrities, politicians and the superwealthy of nations around the world sent their not-quite-A-list sons. The school had a number of advantages: it stressed sports—or games, as the school called them—rather than academics; it was in out-of-the-way New Hampshire, which meant it was both difficult for the school’s privileged students to get into too much trouble with drugs, sex or alcohol, and it was distant enough to provide an excuse for parents not visiting except under the most extreme circumstances.

By the sixties there was regular limo service from New York and Boston and there was floatplane service from both those cities for parents who couldn’t wait to see their sons ensconced behind the mossy granite wall that surrounded the old monastic compound.

It was the perfect spot to send a World War Two naval hero and retired admiral’s son with a relentlessly B-plus average and utterly average SAT scores whose father wanted him to become president. Likable, handsome and with a great smile, but basically just an ordinary guy with a good haircut and great hockey skills.

Hockey was the only thing he’d ever excelled at, beyond being heir to a billion-dollar oil fortune on his mother’s side. The game was, in the end, the real reason for his attendance at this fortieth reunion. More than his eventual graduation from the Abbey and his nudge-and-a-wink entrance into Yale, it had been his win over the Winter Falls Wolves as captain of the Abbey Argonauts and the winning of the coveted St. Joseph’s Cup that had been the proudest moment of his pre-presidential life. As Morrie Adler had once put it in a Charlie Rose interview, “It gave him the green light for the rest of his life.”

In his heart of hearts he’d known it was the single thing that finally spurred him on to success; if he could win that game he could win anything. It was one of his biggest benders, too, as he got bombed out of his gourd on the foul crabapple moonshine Morrie Adler made in his hidden basement still, and compounded by Lucky Strikes rolled in Polaroid film emulsion, a dimethyltryptamine, acidlike high discovered by his cousin, Mickey Haines.

Now, with his presidential library being built in San Diego, his $200,000-a-year pension, travel budget, office expenses, a decade’s worth of Secret Service protection and top-of-the-line health insurance coming out of the taxpayer’s pocket all ready to go and waiting for him at the end of his term in a year and a half, it only seemed right to cap it all off with a visit to the Abbey.

The President of the United States thought about that while seated in the luxuriously appointed passenger’s compartment of Marine One as it droned across the late-afternoon Vermont sky on its way to Winter Falls. Beside him, Morrie was going over the most recent intelligence reports on the jihad slayings, trying to make sense of it all and coming up empty. Below them the snow-mantled forest stretched to the horizon. Morrie lit a Cohiba, took a deep drag and leaned back in the butter-soft leather armchair, a cut-crystal glass of 107-proof Pappy Van Winkle’s Family Reserve on the rocks in the holder by his right hand.

“You think Shannon O’Doyle will be at the game?” Morrie asked wistfully.

“The Snow Queen?” The president laughed. Shannon O’Doyle had been the sexual fantasy of every boy at the Abbey and at Winter Falls High. Naturally ash blond and shy, her nylons made that terribly erotic whispering sound when she crossed her legs. “She’s probably a gray-haired old lady by now.”

“So what?” Morrie replied. “Some dreams go on forever.” He smiled around the fat Cuban cigar. Those really were the good old days. “And, anyway, we’re gray-haired old men.”

The president sighed. Why was it that it took so long to get where you were going but the time spent after arriving was so brief? It was the one real problem with the American Dream: inevitably you woke up. The helicopter rumbled onward over the trees and the president stared out the window, thinking about Shannon O’Doyle’s nylons and the shivering, dangerous sound of skates rushing on ice.

“What are the odds this Kessler guy is right?” Peggy asked. They were sitting in the back booth at Gorman’s, overlooking the dock and the flat, bright white of the lake ice, turning gold now with the fading light of the winter sun. The iceboats were drawn up in a row, their sails furled, the roaring wind off the lake sending up a strange, cicadalike hum through their taut rigging.

Holliday sipped his coffee and stared out the window at the bleak, frozen scene. In the summer the docks and the lake probably looked about their best at this time of day. “Pretty good,” he said, feeling as bleak as the frigid scenery. “He seemed pretty convincing.”

“He sounded convincing in his living room at the Dakota in New York,” said Peggy. “Reality is a little different.” She lifted her shoulders. “It could just be coincidence. There’s nothing going on here, I swear.”

“Kessler doesn’t believe in coincidence any more than I do,” answered Holliday. “He believes in synchronicity.” He put down the coffee and began to tick off points on his fingers. “A president is coming to visit. Conveniently assigned to the event is Mike Harris, who’s also a direct relation of Kate Sinclair. The timing is right—these days it’s a short news cycle, and our new, distinguished vice president, Richard Pierce Sinclair, is soon to go off the radar. Winter Falls was voted the safest place in America, which makes it a perfect target. Easy to crack and shocking to see destroyed. If Sinclair and Rex Deus want to make a statement, this is the moment and this is the place.”

“And if we’re wrong?”

“Then we’re wrong and we look somewhere else. Nothing wasted.”

“Except time,” muttered Peggy. “Time we could have spent elsewhere.”

“JFK said something about assassination: ‘If anyone is crazy enough to want to kill a president of the United States, he can do it. All he must be prepared to do is give his life for the president’s.’”

“What’s your point?”

“This country has spent a trillion dollars on antiterrorism since 9/11 and yet we couldn’t stop a guy with a bomb in his crotch on a flight to Detroit. You just have to do your best. Nobody appointed us the president’s saviors; that’s what the damned Secret Service is for.”

“And what if Kate Sinclair and Rex Deus have infiltrated the Secret Service? It’s not impossible, you know. She seems to have wormed her way into everything else in Washington. Why not the Presidential Detail?”

“Does that make it our responsibility?” Holliday said.

“Officially, no. Morally, maybe.”

“I’m not the nation’s moral arbiter,” said Holliday, a note of bitterness in his voice.

“Maybe you should be,” said Peggy. “We certainly need one. And even a voice in the wilderness eventually gets heard.”

“Kessler’s given us a bit of an edge—believe me, Peg, he knows more than he’s telling. Max Kessler’s manipulated his way through every administration since Reagan. He
wants
us to be here. He knows something’s going to happen in Winter Falls tonight and he’s hoping we can stop it.”

“How? What are we looking for?”

“Tritt. He’ll be here somewhere—I guarantee it. And this time it won’t be just an assassination. If Kessler’s right he’ll amp it up. Kate Sinclair needs something big enough to trigger Matoon and all the rest of it.”

“I think we’re both nuts. I feel like I’m in the middle of one of those conspiracy theories you read about on the Internet,” said Peggy. “It’s like . . . this can’t be real and we can’t be in the middle of it. Why us? A couple of ordinary people in the middle of a military coup,
here
, in the United States? It’s crazy.”

“Tell that to John Wilkes Booth,” said Holliday. “He was a second-rate actor who changed the course of American history when he assassinated Abraham Lincoln. Adolf Hitler was a failed artist and a lowly corporal in World War One, but he was eventually the driving force behind the death of fifty million people. Sometimes the conspiracy theorists are right, kiddo.” Holliday glanced at his watch. Two more hours to the face-off. They were running out of time. Holliday touched Peggy on the arm. “Come on,” he said quietly. “Time we were on our way.”

32

Chief Randy Lockwood sat in his small office in the Municipal Building, hemmed in by the three mongooselike agents who’d been glued to him since eight o’clock that morning. Dotty had told him to wear the dress uniform out of respect for the president, but he felt a little ridiculous. Besides the fact that typically it only came out for cop funerals in other towns, it also happened to be freezing cold outside and beginning to snow, and the wind blew through every stupid brass buttonhole. If that weren’t enough to make him extremely uncomfortable, he found all the medals and citation bars a little embarrassing.

Only one of the agents, Special Agent in Charge Saxby, spoke to him. The other two were apparently there to watch Saxby, or maybe even Lockwood himself; he still wasn’t sure. “It’s all unnecessary,” snapped Saxby. “Someone should talk to them.”

“I didn’t have anything to do with it,” said Lockwood. “The headmaster at the Abbey School suggested it to the principal at the high school and they extended the invitation jointly to the president.”

“Nobody checked with us, no one checked with Homeland and no one said a word to the Secret Service,” Saxby grumbled. “The stupid son of a bitch drops a puck and the operation costs the taxpayers over a million dollars and takes us away from what we should be doing, which is tracking terrorists, not escorting lame ducks on junkets into the damned bush.”

“Don’t blame me,” said Lockwood. “I didn’t vote for him.”

“After the attack in Virginia the current threat level is Orange. You know what that means?”

“Sure,” said Lockwood dryly. “It’s like ordering a Venti White Chocolate Mocha Frappuccino at Starbucks. Defcon One and Broken Arrow and Bent Spear and all that James Bond-coded bull puckie terminology you guys throw around. It’s a big deal, right?”

“You can call it what you want, Chief Lockwood, but it means there is a high risk of terrorist activity in the homeland at the moment. That’s something we take very seriously. You should, too.”

“I’m old-fashioned, Agent Saxby. What my dad used to call a bonehead, a practical guy. So listen up when you’re in my town, all right? I was a quarterback in football because I wanted to impress the girls. When I went to Vietnam I realized the idea wasn’t to kill Vietcong; it was to survive the tour. When I went back for the second tour it was to get rank and up my pension.

“When I came back here it was to give out parking tickets and go fishing. The last murder we had in Winter Falls was twenty-five years ago when one of the cottagers found out her husband was screwing a girlfriend back in New York. She got off with provoked manslaughter and three years’ probation. She’s one of the school trustees to this day.

“I’m not going to get all hot and bothered about your Code Reds or whatever you call them. The game is being played on the Abbey School rink, not the World Trade Center, and the president will only be here for a couple of hours. If you can’t spot a jihadist in this crowd, then you don’t deserve your job.”

Saxby gave him a sour look. “Do you know why those planes flew into the Trade Center towers, Mr. Practical Policeman?”

“Why don’t you tell me, SAC Saxby?”

“They were a target, Chief Lockwood,” said Saxby. “And they were easy. The two tallest buildings in New York City. They were also arranged so that when you looked at them from due north or due south, which was how they were attacked, they looked like a solid slab. Even with that the first one almost missed. A practical target. And that’s what you are, parking tickets or not, fishing or not. This place, with the president in it, has a target painted on its back whether you like it or not. You’re the safest town in America with the President of the United States in the bull’s-eye. Osama bin Laden couldn’t have had a better wet dream.”

“Let’s hope you’re wrong, Agent Saxby,” he said. “I’ve done the best I could under the circumstances. I’ve got both shifts of my men out; I’ve given half of them to the Secret Service guys and your people to pair up with. Everybody knows everybody else in town. Strangers stand out like sore thumbs.

“It’s not like its summer, with tourists coming and going all the time. They brought in sniffer dogs to check out the seats at the rink for bombs; they’ve put up metal detectors anywhere His Honor will be going. They’ve cleared a landing spot for the chopper in the park in front of the Municipal Building, there’s two Secret Service Escalades waiting that arrived this morning and your guys have had that little helicopter of yours buzzing around all day, looking for snipers on rooftops. I’m not sure there’s not a hell of a lot more we can do.”

Suddenly Saxby’s expression changed. From sour it went to worn and barren. He looked as though the weight of the world was bearing down on him, grinding him down, making him old before his time. “That’s always the problem, Chief Lockwood. You always do whatever you can, you cover every base, you look in every nook and cranny but it’s never enough. Most of the time this kind of thing is the most boring duty in the world.

“You read all those Tom Clancy books and watch all those hard-ass shows on TV but it’s all a load of crap; looking for terrorists is a lot of crap. I’ve been doing this job for thirty-two years and seven months. Five months away from mandatory, and from day one it’s been nothing but nerves because sometimes it’s just never enough, and sometimes you overlook something, and sometimes before you know it, the whole thing blows up in your face and you’re half a second too late. You oooh when you should have ahhhed, you go left when you should have gone right, and for thirty-two years and seven months my nerves have been cocked like a loaded gun, just waiting for that one mistake.”

He paused. “My insurance agent once told me that everyone has a freight train and a railroad crossing in his or her life and you never see it coming until its too late.”

“Nice, uplifting insurance agent you have,” said Lockwood, trying to lighten things up. But he knew exactly what the gray-haired FBI man meant. You never knew where the bullet that hit you came from. One of these days he could stop a rowdy summertime DUI and find himself looking down the barrel of some punk’s Saturday-night special and wind up in the uniform he was wearing right now, except flat on his back in a satin-lined wooden box. Outside the front of the building a big Sandri Sunoco fuel truck rumbled by on its rounds. The wind was rising and the snow was falling even more heavily. It was going to be a nasty night in Winter Falls.

Saxby gave a twisted little smile. “I just want this whole thing to be over and the ex-president to be on his way, and then, Chief Lockwood, maybe you and I can find a place to have a cold beer and a big steak and tell each other old war stories.”

“Amen to that,” agreed Lockwood.