Red Templar (2 page)

1

Lieutenant Colonel John Holliday (U.S. Army Rangers, retired) had spent half a lifetime in the military and had flown millions of miles in various airplanes without the slightest fear for his own safety. But now as he rode along in a Tupolev 154 airliner he was suddenly aware of the craft’s appalling crash record, not to mention its NATO designation:
Careless
.

“Why did we have to take
this
particular flight, Eddie?” Holliday asked his companion. Eddie, whose full name was Edimburgo Vladimir Cabrera Alfonso, was an expatriate Cuban who had saved Holliday’s life recently in the middle of an African revolution. The man was now accompanying him to Turkey, and perhaps on to Russia. They traveled at the request of a man named Victor Genrikhovich, who’d buttonholed them in the Khartoum International Airport. Genrikhovich, who only spoke Russian, looked like someone who’d just walked out of a Bowery flophouse, and claimed he was a curator at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg.

Under most circumstances Holliday would have smiled, given the man a dollar and gone on his way, but this Bowery bum knew the name Helder Rodrigues and the Latin term
Ferrum Polaris
. Either the name or the Latin would have stopped Holliday in his tracks; both together were enough to get him onto a plane bound for Istanbul, even a decrepit old Soviet model belonging to a company called Assos Airways.

“Señor Genrikhovich said it would get us to Istanbul the most quickly,” answered Eddie. The Cuban had been born barely a year after Fidel made his triumphant entrance into Havana in 1959, and spoke fluent Russian. He turned to Genrikhovich, who sat across the aisle eating his complimentary cheese sandwich, and spoke a few machine-gun phrases. Genrikhovich nodded and spoke briefly through a mouthful of half-chewed sandwich. Eddie turned back to Holliday. “Same as before. He says there is someone in Istanbul he wants us to meet. This man will explain everything.”

“He has to tell us something. I’m on a plane to Turkey, for Christ’s sake. Who are we meeting?” Holliday asked.

Another exchange between Eddie and Genrikhovich, and Eddie turned back to Holliday. “His name is Theodore Dimitrov. A monk.”

A monk—at least that made a bit of sense, thought Holliday. Helder Rodrigues had been a monk of sorts, guardian of Aos, Sword of the East, one of four swords taken out of the Holy Land by four different Templar Knights shortly after the fall of Acre in 1291, which effectively ended the Christian presence in the Holy Land.

Aos in turn was the perfect mate to the sword he and his cousin Peggy had discovered hidden in his uncle Henry’s library at his home in Fredonia, New York: Hesperios, Sword of the West, the sword that had taken him and Peggy halfway around the world and back again and showed them a dark, underground universe of secrets that still plagued him.

And now this—Ferrum Polaris, Sword of the North. The third Damascus blade of the quartet supposedly made by Alberic, the mythical and magical dwarf blacksmith common to the mystical cultures of a dozen empires and nations. To Holliday it somehow seemed that the ghosts of those four Templar Knights from eight hundred years ago were haunting him, forcing him to discover their final secrets before their souls could finally rest.

The seat belt sign flashed on and the intercom crackled as the heavily accented voice of the pilot announced that they were making their final approach to Istanbul Atatürk Airport. Holliday sighed. He stared up at a loose, rattling rivet in the roof of the old aircraft and hoped for the best.

2

The Tupolev 154 landed without incident and eventually the three men made their way through customs and immigration. Genrikhovich’s tattered Russian Federation passport, as well as Eddie’s pale blue República de Cuba passport, raised a few eyebrows among the bored customs staff, especially since the two were in company with an American identified as a retired lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army, but they were allowed to proceed.

They stepped out into the modern concourse and Genrikhovich immediately spoke to Eddie in Russian, casting worried glances in Holliday’s direction every few moments. Finally he stopped talking and began scuttling down the concourse, heading for the car rental agencies.

“Now what?” Holliday asked as he and Eddie followed the Russian down the long, echoing corridor.

“The monk, it seems, is not in Istanbul. We must rent a car.”

Holliday sighed wearily. “So where is he?” His patience with Genrikhovich was rapidly running thin.

“Bulgaria,” said Eddie.

Holliday stopped in his tracks. “You’re kidding me.”

“I am afraid not,
mi coronel
,” the Cuban answered. “The monk is in a place called Ahtopol. Our Russian friend says it is about a hundred and fifty kilometers from here. Perhaps ninety of your miles.”

“You’re sure there really
is
a monk?”

“According to tovarich Genrikhovich there is.”

“So what was this about a restaurant in Istanbul?”

“Tovarich Genrikhovich is extremely hungry. He has not eaten since leaving St. Petersburg two days ago, except for the sandwiches on the aircraft.”

Orange rubber between pieces of white cardboard. Holliday had taken one bite and stuffed the remainder of his into the seat’s barf bag.

“In for a penny, in for a pound,” said Holliday, setting out after Genrikhovich again.

“¿Cómo? ¿Qué dijiste?”
Eddie asked quizzically.

“We’re a day late and a dollar short—we’ve gone too far to back off now.”

“Ah.” Eddie nodded. “In Spanish we say,
‘Faltan cinco para el peso.’
”

Genrikhovich stopped at the Terra Car booth at the far end of the terminal and had a discussion with the man behind the counter. They spoke in neither Russian nor Turkish as far as Holliday could tell. He asked Eddie, but the Cuban only shrugged. Finally Genrikhovich turned, chattered away to Eddie, and then turned and looked expectantly toward Holliday.

“It is difficult to rent a car that you can take across borders,” explained Eddie, translating. “He needs your credit card to get approval.”

The rental car turned out to be a Moskvich Aleko of roughly the same vintage as the Tupolev on which they’d flown into Turkey. Not only did Holliday have to pay the rental fee, insurance and security deposit; he had to drive as well, since he was the only one with an international driver’s license.

With the car dealt with they went in search of food for Genrikhovich. His choice, bizarrely, was one of three Burger Kings at the airport, where he inhaled a Quad Stacker and fries. Holliday settled for a Whopper Jr., and Eddie begged off entirely, refusing to eat what he referred to as
la carne de la calle
—“street meat.”

They finally set off, the four-cylinder sewing-machine engine in the Moskvich grinding and banging, barely making fifty miles an hour on the surprisingly good highway leading northeast. Within ten minutes of leaving the airport, Genrikhovich was groaning, his stomach gurgling, and he muttered,
“Prash-chayn-ya,”
every few seconds for the inevitable and gaseous results of a Quad Stacker on an empty stomach. Eddie rolled the window down and smiled, enjoying the early-fall scenery.

For the first hour the roads were smooth—modern freeways with good signage, even if it was in an incomprehensible language. Foreign traffic signs never bothered Holliday, though; there were invariably rest stops and roadside food and lodging turn-ins where a traveler could always find someone willing to give directions, even if it was half in broken English and half in sign language. As a soldier, Holliday had done a lot of traveling, and in his opinion most people were proud of their country and proud of their innate hospitality—with the possible exception of the Asmat people of New Guinea, who would sooner eat you than feed you.

By the second hour they’d veered even farther north toward the coast, and the roads went from good to bad very quickly. Soon they were traveling on old concrete pavement that kept throwing up stones that sounded like machine-gun bullets whacking into the underbelly and the side panels of the car. Scrubby cedars and pines edged both sides of the two-lane road. By then Eddie had rolled up the window because of the dust and Genrikhovich’s incessant
“prash-chayn-ya”
apologies for the state of his bowels. The noxious effect of a half pound of meat, four slices of rubbery cheese and six strips of fatty bacon had turned the air in the small, hot and noisy car into a fetid soup.

There turned out to be several border crossings. The first was a modern arrangement of buildings, flags and poles, which they got through with a minimum of fuss and lots of smiles. They quickly filled out visa forms and had their passports duly stamped, and Holliday used one of his credit cards to purchase a walletful of smallish pink and blue twenty-lev notes from the border post’s ATM.

The second border crossing was a slightly tougher-looking but abandoned version of the first that dated back to perestroika. The last one, small, overgrown and choked with underbrush, was a plain, one-man hut with a broken barrier that was probably World War II vintage. It was the off-season, so there wasn’t much traffic.

A few minutes later the two lanes became one, with a mysterious dotted white line where the shoulder should have been. Off to the right the Black Sea appeared, hazy in the distance. To Holliday it looked like every other ocean he had ever seen, and he’d seen a lot of them through the years. Maybe too many. He’d thought about that a lot since the horrors he’d witnessed recently, deep in the African jungle. Maybe it was time to quit. Maybe it was time to do what old soldiers were supposed to do, just fade away. It wasn’t the first time the thought had crossed his mind in the last few years.

Dust or not, Holliday and Eddie rolled down their windows. In the backseat, Genrikhovich just moaned.

“You never talk to me about the ladies,
mi compadre
. You never talk about you make sex like other men,” said Eddie.

Holliday burst out laughing. He turned toward Eddie, whose deep brown eyes were twinkling like an Irishman’s. The big black Cuban was grinning. He reached out and poked a forefinger into Holliday’s ribs.

“You not
un
comepinga
, are you, a
maricón
?”

“No, not if that’s what I’m pretty sure I think it means.”

“You have a lady, a wife?”

“I did, a long time ago.”

“Where is she now?”

“She died. Cancer. More than ten years ago now.”

“
Mi mas sentido pesame, compadre
, but that is a long time, no?”

“Yes.”

“You loved her very much, yes?”

“Yes, very much.”

“Did you have children?”

“No, unfortunately. We both wanted them, but . . .”

“
Se agote el tiempo—
time ran out, yes?”

“Yes.”

“I have many, little Eddie . . . Eduardo, not Edimburgo.
¡Alabado sea Dios!
, I would not do that to a child . . . Cleopatra, Estrella, Domingo, Miroslava . . .”

“Miroslava? Funny name for a Cuban.”

“My mother, she had admiration for a famous Mexican actress, Miroslava Stern.”

“There was such a person?”

“Of course, she is starred with Mel Ferrer in
The Brave Bulls
. It was the story of Luis Bello; ‘the Swordsman of Guerreras,’ they call him. The greatest matador in all of Mexico. Very, how you say,
classico
with the ladies as well. He would say to one,
‘Cada día te quiero más que ayer, y menos que mañana.’
‘I love you today, but not as much as I will tomorrow.’ And they would fall into his arms. Ay, what a man was this!”

“Where are these children?”

“In Habana.”

“And their mother?”

“Many mothers. One for each child, which is what I am saying to you. You need . . .
la variedad, ¿comprende?
”

“Variety?”

“
Sí
, variety,
la variedad
.”

“So you’re telling me I should get out more—is that it?”

“¿Qué?”
Eddie responded, then smiled, nodding. “Yes, this is what I am saying.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“That would be a start.”

Holliday decided that it was time to change the subject. “Genrikhovich’s asleep,” he said, glancing in the rearview mirror. The Russian was snoring loudly.

“At least he is not making
peos
anymore.” Eddie grinned, pinching his nostrils.

“Good point,” said Holliday. “Maybe things are looking up.”

Ahead of them Ahtopol appeared, a 1950s pastel vision of a Black Sea resort for high-ranking apparatchiks, government employees with enough money to rent an umbrella on the beach and a pink or yellow or blue little villa by the sea. A Marxist-Leninist paradise. The place was a ghost town, and from the highway they could see that all the beaches were empty. It was October and winter was in the wind.

3

The monastery of Saint Simeon the Plowman lay nestled in the hills above Ahtopol, surrounded by stands of birch and alder. Farther up the slopes spread the cool green of a pine forest that had once provided the lumber for the fishing fleets and trading ships that set out from Peronticus, as the Romans had once called the seaside town.

The monastery had the typical look of most Templar sites Holliday had seen, as much fortress as a place of religious enlightenment. A high stone wall surrounded a round church, its windows doubling as slits for archers. There was a refectory behind the church, presumably with the kitchens below, and a bleak-looking windowless chamber that was probably a charnel house for depositing the bones of monks who’d died here over the past eight hundred years.

Ranged around two sides of the fortress walls was a cloister with cells for the monks, and in the center of the cloister a courtyard with a well and a statue. For a monastery dedicated to Saint Simeon Stylites, the hermetic who set himself upon a stone column to deny himself temptation. Simeon himself would have been an appropriate subject for a sculpture, but instead there was a life-size figure of a horse and two riders, one of the most enduring symbols of the Templar Knights. The statue was in bronze green with age, the walls and church were local pale stone and the roofs were iron gray slate.

Holliday parked the rental car on the gravel beside the death house and woke up Genrikhovich, who still looked a little queasy. Leaving the doors and windows of the Moskvich open to give the vehicle a much-needed airing out, the three men entered the church. It was a simple room, with a single aisle lined with perhaps twenty benchlike pews on each side, the aisle leading to a plain stone altar with a rose window behind it with a rendition of the face of Christ. Each of the four petals of the rose contained the figure of a knight, the familiar Croix Rouge of the Templars on their body-length “kite” shields. Each knight wore a helm and hauberk of chain mail and carried a sword in his right hand. At the feet of each knight was a single word on a ribbon: Aos, Hesperios, Polaris, Octanis. The stars of east, west, north and south. It was certainly no coincidence. The four words were the names given to the four swords that carried the hidden and coded message out of Castle Pelerin and the Holy Land:
We are betrayed. The king and the Holy Father conspire against us. Let Sagittarius be the guardian’s inspiration and pray that he be guided by the loins of the bear.

Although the last part of the message remained obscure, its meaning lost in time, the first part was prophetic enough. King Philip IV of France, in the midst of a financially draining war with England, had already expelled the Jews from his country, seizing their assets, and by 1293 was conspiring with his chief political adviser, the Bishop of Bordeaux, Raymond Bertrand de Got, to assassinate the pope, then replace him with the bishop.

As pope, on Philip’s order, de Got would dissolve the Templars and seize their enormous assets in France, thus simultaneously absolving Philip of responsibility for his equally enormous debts to the order. A simple enough plan on the face of it, but it took time to put all the pieces in place, giving the Templars an opportunity to discreetly move the greater part of their wealth out of France and Philip’s clutches, as well as to infiltrate the royal court with well-placed spies. On Thursday, October 12, 1307, there were fifteen heavily loaded Templar ships in the harbor at La Rochelle, the last of the Templar fleet in France. The next day, when Philip’s order to arrest the senior members of the order took effect, the ships had vanished. Their secrets vanished with them.

*  *  *

A monk in the plain working robes of a Russian Orthodox monk was on his knees in front of the altar with a bucket and a scrub brush, cleaning the stone floor as Holliday, Eddie and Genrikhovich entered the monastery chapel. Genrikhovich muttered something to Eddie, and the Cuban turned to Holliday, nodding toward the monk.

“That is the man, Theodore Dimitrov.”

The monk stood as they approached, drying his hands unceremoniously on his water-stained robes. He was much younger than Holliday had expected, no more than thirty or so, slim, dark haired, with a long, narrow face and deep-set eyes as black as Eddie’s skin. He nodded perfunctorily to Genrikhovich, then concentrated on Holliday.

“You are Holliday, the one who knew Brother Rodrigues?” His English had a faint British cast to it.

“Briefly,” Holliday answered, surprised at the monk’s abrupt question.

“You keep the book?”

The bloodstained notebook of names, contacts and coded account numbers given to him by the dying Rodrigues, the
codex mystericum
to nine hundred years of the ancient order’s history.

“Yes.”

“You keep it safely?”

“In a bank vault.”

“You saw the rose window. You know its significance?”

“It marks the four swords that went out from Pelerin.”

“Who made them?”

“Alberic Fecere,” Holliday responded.

“What is the true meaning of the cross?”

“The four sides of the pyramid, the secret revealed.”

“Which sword was yours?”

“Hesperios,” said Holliday. “The Sword of the West.”

“Which sword did Rodrigues have?”

“Aos, Sword of the East.”

The monk nodded as though Holliday had passed a test of some kind.

“Come with me,” said Dimitrov.

The monk led them to a narrow door to the left of the altar, which he opened with an iron key hanging from his belted cassock. Stone stairs led downward. The monk headed down and the others followed. The stairs led to the chapel crypt. It was a single, barrel-vaulted room lit by a lone clerestory window, which allowed in a bar of sunlight that fell upon the stone effigy of a knight set on a high granite plinth. Instead of a shield across his breast there was a sword. A motto was carved into the plinth, the letters worn with age and time:
Non nobis, non nobis, Domine Sed nomini tuo da gloriam.
Not to us, not to us, O Lord, but to your name give glory.
Beneath the inscription was a circular seal—a double-headed eagle gripping a sword in its talons circumscribed by the inscription:
Magister Templaris in Rostov
.

The double-headed eagle, a heraldic device used by half the countries in Europe, including Bulgaria, and the central part of the Romanov crest.

“Who was he?” Holliday asked.

“Mikail Alexandreivich Nevsky, the last master of the ‘Rus’ Templars, an illegitimate child and grandson of Alexander Nevsky. He had no place in the hierarchy of his family even though he was a prince, so he joined the order.”

“He carried one of the swords from Pelerin?”

Dimitrov nodded. “Polaris.”

Sword of the North.