Red Templar (3 page)

4

The monk brought them out of the crypt and led them to a small office in what had probably once been the sacristy of the little church. There was still a large vestment cupboard with beautifully carved and decorated doors against one wall and a table on which stood various gold chalices, patens, ciboria, aspergilla and other liturgical vessels.

There was a plain wooden desk and several chairs set around it. The monk sat behind the desk and gestured to his guests to seat themselves. The only artwork on the wall was a wood-and-gold-leaf-framed icon of Saint Simeon seated on his column. The walls, like the rest of the church, were bare stone.

Tired and more than a little annoyed at the game of hares and hounds he’d been lured into playing for the last ten hours or so, Holliday spoke first. “All right then, Brother Theodore, if that’s what you call yourself, I’ve come a long way on the strength of a name and a Latin phrase. I’d much rather be sitting down to a nice rib-eye dinner at the Plaza right now, which was my previous intention, so let’s see if my side trip to sunny Bulgaria was worth it or not.”

The monk said nothing. He opened the drawer in the desk and withdrew a large manila envelope, pale with age. He slid it across the desk to Holliday, who opened it and removed a single photograph. It showed six men standing in the courtyard of the monastery, identifiable because of the statue. The six men stood in a semicircle examining a plain medieval short sword.

“Do you recognize any of the men in that photograph?” Dimitrov said. “My grandfather was prior then. He took the photograph from the shadows of the cloister. Had they seen him he would have undoubtedly been killed on the spot.”

“I recognize three of them,” said Holliday, his heart pounding. A photograph such as this one simply should not exist. “Averell Harriman, the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, Lavrenti Beria, the head of what was then the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, and Molotov, Stalin’s foreign minister. I don’t know who the others are. The man in the business suit on the left looks vaguely familiar.”

The monk spoke again. “That’s because he’s George Herbert Walker, grandfather to President George Herbert Walker Bush, and great-grandfather to President George W. Bush. He was vice president of Harriman’s Wall Street company.”

“The other two?”

“The man with the long beard is Sergey Vladimirovich Simansky, better known as Alexis I, Russian Orthodox patriarch of Moscow and all the Russias. The slim man in the plain brown NKVD uniform with the sidearm is Molotov’s aide, Vladimir Spiridonovich Putin.”

“Putin’s father?”

“Yes. The photograph was taken during the Yalta Conference in 1945. Harriman borrowed Roosevelt’s C-54
Sacred Cow
and they flew into Burgas Airport. It was less than a two-hour flight across the Black Sea. They weren’t even missed at the conference.”

“They came for the sword? Polaris?”

“Yes. The abbot, a corrupt man who it later turned out was a Nazi collaborator, gave it to them.”

“But why on earth would they want it? How did they know it was here?”

“Putin’s father had been with an NKVD sabotage squad during the war. He heard about the sword and the story behind it. He in turn told his father, and
his
father told Stalin.”

“Putin’s
grandfather
knew Stalin?” Holliday said, not quite believing it.

“Spiridon Putin was Stalin’s cook,” said Dimitrov. “The only man Stalin trusted to prepare his meals. Stalin even brought him to Yalta. Before that he cooked for Lenin, and before that he was a cook for the czar’s family.”

“That’s all very interesting, but it still doesn’t explain why they wanted the sword, and it sure as hell doesn’t explain why the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union and a Wall Street financier were interested, not to mention the Russian version of the pope at the time.”

“My grandfather heard Molotov mention the Order of the
Sirin
,” said the monk. “The
zhar-ptitsa
.”

“The
pájaro de fuego
 . . . the
fénix
,” explained Eddie.

“The Order of the Phoenix?” Holliday asked.

“It dates back to the time of Yaroslav the Wise and the establishment of the Saint Sophia Cathedral in Kiev. To most Ukrainians, Yaroslav was a hero for making the Orthodox Church truly Russian with the appointment of a Russian metropolitan. To others and to history he was clearly a white supremacist. The charge of the Order of the Phoenix was to bring an all-white Russia and specifically the Ukraine to world domination.”

“A Russian Ku Klux Klan,” said Holliday.

“Far more meaningful than that,” said the monk. “Imagine your Ku Klux Klan with the power of both the state and Church behind it. There are two hundred and twenty-eight million members of the Orthodox Church around the world, the large majority of them Russian—one hundred and twenty-five million, to be precise. It is a number to be reckoned with, Colonel Holliday, especially when it is effectively under the control of the
Sirin
, the upper-echelon members of the Phoenix order.”

“How many?” Holliday asked, startled.

“Two hundred and twenty-eight million, of which three-quarters of a million are American.”

“That’s a little hard to believe,” said Holliday, his tone skeptical. “But even if it’s true, it still doesn’t explain why Harriman and Walker were there, especially with a monster like Beria.”

“No, it doesn’t.”

Holliday thought for a moment. “Was Beria one of these
Sirin
?”

“Almost certainly.” The monk nodded. “In fact, it hardly could have been otherwise. Beria joined the NKVD, or Cheka, as it was known then in 1921. The NKVD in its various incarnations virtually ran the order dating all the way back to the 1917 revolution. Perhaps even before.”

“Before?”

“Before the NKVD there was the Okhrana, the czar’s secret police, and secretly members of the order as well.”

“It still doesn’t make any sense. Why would they have been interested in the sword?”

Throughout Holliday’s conversation with the monk, Eddie Cabrera had been keeping up a whispered running translation for Genrikhovich. At the mention of the sword, a word he clearly recognized in English, the Hermitage curator began a frenzied stream of Russian. The man was clearly extremely upset. Finally he stopped and turned to Holliday, his eyes wide and his expression one that Holliday could only conclude was abject fear.

“What’s he so frightened about?” Holliday asked.

“Yay-eech-a!”
Genrikhovich blurted.

“The eggs,” translated Eddie. “Something about eggs.”

“What eggs?”

“Fabergé!” Genrikhovich said, obviously agitated. “
Yay-eech-a
Fabergé!”

Holliday’s brow wrinkled. The priceless Fabergé eggs given to the wife of the czar each Easter. What connection could they possibly have to a compromising photograph taken during the Yalta Conference in 1945, where Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin agreed to cut up Europe like a birthday cake, and a Templar sword lost to history in the first years of the fourteenth century?

5

Holliday held up a hand. “Okay, let’s stop this right now. Back it up a little.” He looked at Genrikhovich hard, then turned to his friend Eddie. “Ask him how he knew about Rodrigues, and how he knew we were going to be at the Khartoum airport when we were.”

Eddie spun out a long, lilting line of Russian. Watching Eddie speak like a native was almost as strange as being in Dublin and hearing a waiter in a Chinese restaurant take your order in an Irish accent. Coming from a relentlessly upstate New York, blue-collar, Presbyterian background, Holliday was always astounded at people who could speak fluently in two languages, or in Eddie’s case three: Spanish, English and Russian.

Genrikhovich’s response was equally complicated and accompanied by various incomprehensible hand gestures. Dimitrov’s name was mentioned several times. In the end it was a waste of time.

“I can answer for myself, Colonel Holliday,” said the monk.

“Please do.”

“Do you know the name Theodore Svetoslav?”

Holliday dug into his memory banks. The file drawer for Bulgarian history had very little in it, but it was just enough. “Wasn’t he an emperor?”

“He was, between 1300 and 1313. I’m named after him, in fact, Theodore Svetoslav Dimitrov. My family traces back to his on both sides.”

“I’m sure that’s very impressive, but right now I’m not. What’s the connection?”

“As well as being emperor, Theodore Svetoslav was also a friend to the Templars and they to him. At that time much of the old Pilgrim Road from the Holy Land ran through the emperor’s territory. They fought with him in the Battle of Skafida in 1304, less than a hundred miles from here. A Templar saved the emperor’s life at the bridge at the Battle of Skafida. A special Templar.”

“Don’t tell me—the Templar in your crypt.”

“Mikail Alexandreivich Nevsky.” The monk nodded. “From the bloodline of Mikhail Yaroslavich, also known as Michael of Tver or Michael the Saint.”

“I’m not following,” said Holliday.

“My grandfather was a member of the White Templars, as was his father before him and his father before him. As am I.” There was a long moment of silence. Holliday knew what was required of him—it had been one of the first things he’d learned from the notebook Rodrigues had given to him as he lay dying in that volcanic crater in the Azores.

“What do you seek?” Holliday asked.

“I seek what was lost,” answered Dimitrov.

“And who lost it?”

“The king lost it.”

“And where is the king?”

“Burning in hell,” said Dimitrov with a smile. Holliday relaxed slightly. The exchange was almost a thousand years old, devised after the fall of the Templars so they could safely identify one another. The first time Holliday had used it was with Pierre Ducos, the fat little spider of a man who seemed to be at the center of the whole Templar web, living out his years in the little hilltop village of Domme in France.

“I never met Brother Rodrigues, but we corresponded. I was terribly saddened by his death. He was a good man.”

“That he was,” said Holliday, remembering the tall, dark man with the deep-set eyes.

“It was the first time I heard your name,” said Dimitrov.

“From whom?” Holliday asked.

“Pierre Ducos,” replied the monk.

“And he was the one who told you I was in Khartoum?”

“Yes. After
Gospodin Doktor
Genrikhovich contacted me with his story. I thought I should inform you. I asked him where I might find you and he told me.”

“And what is
Gospodin Doktor
Genrikhovich’s story?”

“In a nutshell,
Gospodin
Genrikhovich says that the Fabergé eggs in the Kremlin Armoury collection are fakes. He also says that one of the eggs is the lost secret of secrets that allowed the
Sirin
to invisibly rule Russia for hundreds of years. According to Genrikhovich, if the secret were revealed it could destroy the world.” Dimitrov paused and glanced at the Russian. He turned back to Holliday.

Holliday gave Genrikhovich a long, skeptical look. “And what secret is that?”

Genrikhovich began to babble wildly, throwing his arms around. He looked as though he were having an apoplectic fit, his eyes bugging out, sweat beading on his face and his entire body shaking.

“He does not want me to tell you, not yet, but I feel I must. The key will reveal, among other terrible things, the final location of the Apophasis Megale, the Great Declaration of Simon Magus. The declaration supposedly proves beyond any doubt that Jesus Christ was a mortal man who lived and died as all of us do. And according to Genrikhovich, there is even more that he does not know about.”

Holliday took a breath. Simon Magus was the court magician of Emperor Nero, who could, with only the power of his mind, levitate and move objects at will. Simon Magus, the man who virtually single-handedly invented the gnostic creed. Simon Magus, the man the Catholic Church called the King of Heretics and perhaps the devil himself. Simon Magus, whose very name gave the world the term ‘simony’: the crime of paying for the sacraments and holy offices. If the document was what it purported to be and the proof offered for Christ’s ‘humanness’ by Simon Magus was established, it would rock both the Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches to their very foundations.

Incredible, thought Holliday.

“Katwazanyet, katwazanyet,
Rasputin
katawazanyet!”
Genrikhovich blurted.

“He knew, he knew, Rasputin knew,” Eddie translated.

“Rasputin was one of these
Sirin
, or whatever you call them?” asked Holliday.

“Genrikhovich thinks almost certainly.” Dimitrov nodded. “So was Spiridon Ivanovich Putin, at that time a chef in the Winter Palace of the czars. It is a black conspiracy of terror that goes back a very long time. The secret now belongs to Vladamir Putin, Spiridon’s grandson and presently the prime minister of Russia, the chairman of United Russia and chairman of the Council of Ministers of Russia and Belarus.

“In 2013 Putin will be legally allowed to run for the office of president, and there is no doubt at all that he will win. He controls the state and he controls the Church. He has more power than Stalin ever did, and it grows with each passing day. From the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 to Putin’s rise after forcing Yeltsin to resign, Russia’s place in the world faltered. Vladamir Putin wants to see Russia rise again, and with the
Sirin
and their deadly secrets he will succeed. Have you ever seen a gas and oil pipeline map of Russia? They could choke Europe to death in a minute.”

“The rest of the world wouldn’t allow it,” said Holliday. “It’s not like the old days.”

“Give Putin a little time to strengthen the military and it
will be
the old days all over again,” Dimitrov said. “Over the past few years he’s allowed the Church to infiltrate every facet of daily life in Russia. He doesn’t need the KGB or the FSB anymore—he has the priests. He’s developed a cult of personality in Russia that is at least the equal of Stalin’s. To most people Vladamir Putin
is
Russia.”

“So what am I supposed to do about it?” Holliday said.

“Stop him,” said Dimitrov.

“Don’t be idiotic. I’m one man, a nobody.”

“You’re far from that, Colonel Holliday, and you know it. You have great power at your command, and great wealth. Use them if you have to, but however you do it, you must stop him. Stop the
Sirin
once and for all.”

Sure, thought Holliday. That’s me, Sancho Panza, tilting at windmills. “Nice idea, but how do I practically go about taking on the dark lord of all the Russias?”

“Go with Genrikhovich to St. Petersburg. See what he has to show you. Begin at the beginning.”

“I’m not sure I’m ready for this,” said Holliday. “When you get right down to it, Brother Dimitrov, regardless of my admiration and respect for Helder Rodrigues, I’ve fought too many battles in too many wars and I’m getting a little too old for saving the world. Maybe this is where it should end.”

There was a long silence. Finally the monk reached into the drawer of his desk and took out an old, butterscotch-colored molded leather holster with a snap flap. The leather had been cared for, but the holster was very old. It was also quite small. Dimitrov undid the flap and pulled out a short-barreled pistol. The black plastic grips were embossed with the TOZ logo of the famous Tula Arms Factory. Holliday had never seen one before, but he recognized it from the old weapon-recognition books he’d collected over the years. It was a Korovin .25-caliber automatic, a Russian-made civilian pistol and standard issue for the NKVD back in the early twenties and thirties. Because of the heavy-duty construction of the weapon, the rounds used tended to be loaded with almost twice the powder of a normal .25-caliber round, and the pistol was known for packing a punch almost equivalent to a much larger Browning .45.

“You may have no choice in the matter, Colonel,” said Dimitrov, sliding the weapon across the desk toward Holliday. “Since I spoke with Ducos there have been a number of strangers in the area. The DS may have changed its name since the fall of the Soviet Union, but they still have the same look about them.” The DS was the infamous Bulgarian State Security, KGB-trained and just as feared.

“You’re being watched?” Holliday asked.

“Yes, and my telephone is surely tapped.”

Holliday picked up the lethal-looking little pistol. “Why does a monk have a gun?”

“It belonged to my grandfather. After the war there was a great deal of looting. The monastery has several valuable icons and altarpieces.”

“I wonder where your grandfather got it,” said Holliday, a note of suspicion creeping into his voice. The priors of monasteries didn’t generally pack weapons under their robes.

“He got it from an NKVD agent who thought he was an art collector. My grandfather killed him with his bare hands. He’s buried in an unmarked grave in our little cemetery behind the wall.” The monk smiled. “My grandfather was a man of many talents. He was a
yatak
during the war, a ‘friend of the resistance,’ right under the abbot’s nose.”

“Thanks for the offer,” said Holliday, putting the gun back on the table and sliding it back to Dimitrov. “But I wouldn’t get it through the Turkish border, let alone through airport security.”

Dimitrov shook his head and slid the pistol back to Holliday. “I would suggest that you not return to Turkey and continue north to Varna instead; it’s less than a hundred kilometers, and the connections to St. Petersburg will be much better. When you get to Varna throw the weapon away, but while you are in my country it would make me feel better if you kept it.”

Holliday picked up the pistol and popped out the magazine. He thumbed out a round. The spring was strong and the magazine well oiled. The round was a brand-new Fabrique Nationale hollow-point, the brass gleaming. “It’s in good condition,” Holliday observed.

“My grandfather told me that tools taken care of will in turn take care of you.”

“My uncle Henry used to tell me the same thing, more or less,” said Holliday. “He rescued Hesperios from Hitler’s Berchtesgaden just after the war.” Holliday slid the round back into the magazine, then snapped the magazine back into the grip.

“I have a feeling your uncle and my grandfather would have liked each other,” Dimitrov said.

Holliday picked up the pocket pistol again and hefted it. At least a pound, maybe more. Heavy for such a small weapon. “You’re sure?”

“Certain.” Dimitrov nodded.

Holliday shrugged and slipped the pistol into the pocket of his jacket. “Okay,” he said. “But I’m sure it’ll be unnecessary.”

“Better safe than sorry,” replied the monk.

“My uncle said that, too.” Holliday laughed, standing up. A hundred kilometers to Varna and then the trials and tribulations of buying visas and booking tickets would put them on a plane to St. Petersburg by late evening at best. It was time to go.

*  *  *

The monk was kneeling at the altar in the church when they came for him. He’d heard the squeak of the gate and the creak of the door as it opened, but he did not move from his knees; nor did he stop his prayer. Less than half an hour had passed since his conversation with the American. It was a relief to know that someone else would be taking up the quest that had begun so long ago. He finally ended his prayer:

Many are the scourges of the sinner,

But mercy shall encircle him that hopeth in the Lord.

Be glad in the Lord, and rejoice, ye righteous;

And glory, all ye that are upright of heart.

He stood and turned, his hands held together beneath his robes. There were two of them, one older with very short gray hair, his bad suit barely covering a bulging middle-aged paunch, and a younger one with dark oily hair who wore a brown leather coat.

The older one spoke. “You are Brother Theodore Dimitrov?”

“Yes.”

“You know why we are here?”

“To torture me and force me to tell you things you wish to know.”

The younger one snickered. “We have people in Sofia who do that.”

“We’re just here to accompany you, Brother Dimitrov. The best thing would be to come peacefully.”

“I’m afraid I can’t do that,” answered Dimitrov.

“Yes, you can, priest,” said the younger one. He took a weapon out from under his coat. It was a Veresk, an older Russian-made version of an Uzi, which explained the long coat.

“Put that away, Kostya,” said the older one, taking out his own weapon from under his jacket, this one a much more discreet Yarygin nine-millimeter. He held it loosely in his hand. “Please, Brother Dimitrov. I would like to do this without any unpleasantness.”

“I’m afraid I can’t accommodate you,” answered the monk. The younger one made a threatening gesture with the little submachine gun. The monk wondered for a brief moment which it would be. He decided on the older one. An object lesson for the young man in the leather coat. He took his hands out from between the bell-like sleeves of his robe. In his right hand he held the other weapon his father had taken from the NKVD agent just after the war. The Korovin .25 he’d given the American had been the NKVD agent’s backup gun, worn in a concealed holster on the hip. The other weapon, worn in a shoulder holster, was a Tokarev TT-33, a rough knockoff of the classic Browning .45 and just as powerful. The monk pulled the trigger twice, hitting the older man in the chest and the belly. The older man looked surprised, vomited blood and slid to the floor. The one the older man had called Kostya lifted the Veresk and frantically squeezed the trigger. Nothing happened.