The Templar Throne (25 page)

Rafi reached down to the cooler underneath his table and pulled out a plastic bottle of Neviot spring water and twisted off the cap. He took a long swallow and then another. Peggy wasn’t used to the extreme heat of an Israeli summer and that was worrying him, too. He grinned. It was a fundamental part of the Jewish psyche to worry about one thing or another. Presumably Peggy hadn’t reached that part of the conversion process yet.

He heard the sound of a vehicle coming down the approach road to the temple site. There was a heavy note to the engine, more like the sound of a truck. Rafi slipped on his old Serengeti Driver sunglasses and stood up. He went to the open end of the tent and stood in the blinding sunlight. He watched as the vehicle came down the winding approach road. It was a Humvee in mottled desert camouflage. The Humvee was Israeli Defense Force.

The squat, boxy, armored all-purpose vehicle pulled up beside the fly tent. It was an M1145 model, the one the U.S. Army was using to replace the original version. Whatever branch of the service it came from they had pull in the motor pool. As far as Rafi knew there weren’t more than a handful in the country. During his mandatory stint in the military they were still using Jeeps.

An officer climbed out of the passenger seat and two grunts got out of the back. They were all wearing identical tan uniforms but the officer had three olive branch pips on his green shoulder tabs; a full colonel. The grunts had the triple stripes of staff sergeants on their sleeves. All three were wearing the dark green berets of Military Intelligence Command.

The colonel had a holstered Desert Eagle pistol on his belt; the sergeants both carried futuristic- looking Tavor assault rifles. The colonel approached Rafi. The man looked to be in his late fifties, his square face seamed and lined, the hair at his close-cropped temples grizzled salt and pepper. The two grunts took up positions on either side of him and slightly behind. Their eyes shifted like wolves’, always in motion. They were the colonel’s bodyguard; whoever he was, the colonel was high on the food chain.

“My name is Abraham Ben- El‘azar. I am with IDF Intelligence,” said the colonel. “I am looking for Professor Rafi Wanounou.”

“That would be me,” answered Rafi. “What can I do for you?” he asked, curious.

“It’s your wife, Dr. Wanounou. I’m afraid she has been kidnapped.”

 

Peggy Blackstock walked slowly along Mahane Yehuda Street in central Jerusalem, alternately taking photographs and shopping for dinner and anything else that looked good in the
shuk
Machaneh Yehuda, the city’s famous open-air market. She’d already picked up some fresh dates, pistachios and a bag of meat-and-potato-filled “cigars,” the Moroccan version of pierogies and one of Rafi’s favorites.

Peggy smiled, thinking of her sometimes too serious husband. He’d be out of his mind with worry out there by the Dead Sea if he knew she was shopping alone.

In Rafi’s mind she’d changed from the adventurous girl photographer who’d spent two months in the Amazon rain forest with the Matis Indians learning how to use a blowgun and going through the
Kampo
frog poison ritual—
Kampo
being the oily sweat of the Amazon monkey frog and a drug that was a combination of methamphetamine and the world’s most powerful laxative—all to get her photo story.

Somehow the act of getting pregnant had stripped her of all her toughness and turned her into a delicate flower of womanhood who would wither away if exposed to direct sunlight. On the one hand, it was sweet and romantic; on the other hand, it was a little bit overprotective and claustrophobic, not to mention just plain silly.

Even more worrying to her professorial husband would be the fact that she was shopping alone in the
shuk
. The
shuk
Machaneh Yehuda had been the site of three terrorist suicide bombings in two attacks between 1995 and 2002 and still had barrier checkpoints with armed guards at both the Agrippas Street entrance and the entrance at the Jaffa Road end of the market. It was a ridiculous precaution, of course, and basically just for show. The
shuk
was a rabbit warren of alleys and side streets and anyone who wanted to get into the market unnoticed wouldn’t have the slightest trouble.

Peggy wandered through the noisy throng, looking at the tiny shops standing cheek by jowl with each other. A store selling nothing but halvah in different flavors next to a dealer in Judaica, a barbershop beside a backgammon club so crowded that its tables spilled out onto the already crowded street. A discount CD store next to a fancy jewelry boutique. She glanced upward to the second and third floors of the old buildings. She knew from her research that a lot of the apartments and lofts above the shops were now occupied by artists, writers and musicians. The
shuk
was in transition, going from simply popular to trendy. Greenwich Village in the desert. It was a little sad.

There were two policemen approaching, threading their way easily through the crowd. They were wearing their short-sleeved light blue summer uniforms, at odds with the variety of colorful exotic costumes all around them. One was a plain-faced, middle-aged man, the other a younger woman.

Peggy brought up the Nikon and took a few quick shots. The two cops came to a stop directly in front of her, blocking her path. The crowd broke around them like the current of a river giving way to a boulder in midstream. Shopkeepers paused in the middle of their noisy sales pitches, sensing a bit of drama. Peggy was a little confused; as far as she knew there was no law in Israel against taking pictures of cops. It wasn’t as though they were Mossad or anything.

“Peggy Blackstock?” the male cop asked. Peggy noticed that the female had her hand on the holstered butt of the Jericho 915 on her hip. She also noted that neither one of them had any rank insignia.

How the hell do they know my name?
Peggy thought.

“Yes,” she said.

“I am Pakad Yakov Ben- Haim of the Israeli Police, Headquarters Division.”

A pakad—what was such a high- ranking officer like a chief inspector doing wearing a patrolman’s uniform?

“What can I do for you, Chief Inspector? I hope you don’t mind me taking your picture.” The cop ignored the question.

“Please come with us,” said Ben-Haim quietly. “It’s about your husband. I’m afraid there has been an accident.”

 

Their first sighting of the lonely island was nothing more than a distant smudge on the eastern horizon, balanced on the curving edge of the world, a frighteningly dark mass of clouds in the background, so dark at the spreading base that it was almost black.

“Once we make landfall you’re not going to have much time,” cautioned Gallant. “A couple of hours at most.” The burly lobsterman with the Groucho mustache shook his head. “Any longer than that, you’re on your own and I’m gone.”

Holliday glanced at Meg, expecting some kind of plea or argument, but she said nothing, simply looking blankly and without expression through the windscreen of the
Deryldene D
’s cabin, staring at the slowly forming smudge on the horizon. Holliday found himself hypnotized by the cold, black, roiling clouds that formed a background to the image of the island. It was like staring at a vision of the future, and the future wasn’t good.

They continued east for another hour and a half, the island growing steadily more visible as they approached. Meg had gone below, overcome by her seasickness. At first Sable looked much bigger than it actually was, an illusory desert island shaped in a long crescent, its narrowing arms pointing toward the New World, Arcadia.

Slowly but surely the illusion faded; this was no island of palm trees and beautiful native girls; it was a windswept desolate sandbar, its back to the open sea, its center a spine of wandering dunes barely held together by the tough grasses and bushes that somehow clung to life through the seasons.

A steady wind was blowing from the east, and nearing the shore Holliday could see the blowing wisps of sand rising from the crests of the dunes like wind-borne snow in the middle of a blizzard.

The
Deryldene D
suddenly seemed to lurch in its onward course, the bow swinging abruptly to the south. Gallant cursed under his breath and turned the wheel hard back to port.

“What was that?” Holliday asked.

“That’s the reason so many ships went down on Sable,” said Gallant, grunting with effort as he dragged on the wheel, one eye looking ahead, the other focused on the digital depth finder. “It’s called a gyre. Out west they call it a skookumchuck.”

“What on earth is a skookumchuck?”

“A vortex,” said Gallant, fighting the wheel.

There are four main currents that flow around Sable Island. The Labrador Current, the St. Lawrence Outfall and the Nova Scotia Current running south along the island’s southeastern shore, and the much more powerful and deeper Gulf Stream flowing north along the outer shore.

As huge volumes of water race past the island they set up a whirling Coriolis effect, creating spinning currents of water just below the surface. Sailing ships of the past riding the Gulf Stream up from the Caribbean on their way home to Europe would suddenly find themselves torn off course and thrown up on the ocean- facing banks and bars, while ships heading along the Atlantic Coast to New York and points south would find themselves cast up on the inner beaches.

A map of Sable Island shows hundreds of known wrecks almost evenly divided between the two shores with a slight advantage held by the Gulf Stream coast, probably caused by ships running before the storms. Gallant nodded toward the instruments in front of him as he struggled with the wheel.

“Keep an eye on the echo sounder,” he instructed. “Read me the depths every ten seconds. If you see a yellow-white patch ahead of us, call it out. Same for port and starboard, got that?”

“Got it,” Holliday said and nodded.

With Holliday calling out the numbers they moved steadily toward the island, Gallant guiding them toward the starboard end of the crescent-shaped strip of sand. At some point Meg came up from the cabin, but Holliday barely noticed. She looked toward the shore, then went back down into the cabin and retrieved the two metal detectors and their backpacks. Holliday kept reading off the numbers.

The hidden sandbars threatening to ground them were all at right angles to the shore, which Holliday found strange, but this was no time to ask questions; Gallant was concentrating hard on the approaching coast. The water beneath them became shallower and shallower. Two hundred yards from shore it was barely eight feet. At a hundred yards it was six feet, and at twenty-five yards it was barely four.

“What’s the draft on this thing?” Holliday asked.

“Three feet three inches,” said Gallant. “We’ll ground in a few seconds.”

“Aren’t you afraid of getting stuck?” Meg asked cautiously.

“This time of day the tide’s coming in, not going out,” said Gallant, grinning.

There was a rough grating sound as the
Deryldene D
pushed up on the sand. Gallant pushed the throttle forward, beaching them even more firmly, then switched off the engine.

They had arrived.

Cardinal Antonio Niccolo Spada, Vatican secretary of state, sat beside the large pool at his villa just beyond the north end of the Rome Ring Road. He was wrapped in a thick white terry-cloth robe with the crossed keys and double-headed phoenix of his family coat of arms. It was one of the odd twists of fate that fascinated Spada.

The present Pope was the son of a Bavarian village policeman, while Spada was descended directly from the Borgias. Yet the policeman’s son and onetime member of the Hitler Youth was the Pope, and Spada was only the Pontiff’s second in command. Oh, well; true power often rested behind the throne, even if it was the Cathedra Petri, the Chair of St. Peter.

Spada wrapped the robe more tightly around his shrunken chest. He still loved to swim each day, but even though the afternoon was warm he felt a chill. Another sign that he was getting on in years, the first being that his oldest friends were beginning to die around him.

He wondered if he would go to hell for his transgressions when he died. Established Catholic doctrine said that if he made a final confession and was given extreme unction he would go to heaven but he wasn’t sure he believed in either heaven or hell. Sometimes the old man hoped that death would be more straightforward, a simple end to consciousness and then the everlasting dark.

For Cardinal Spada, Catholicism was far more political than it was spiritual. A true Catholic of the Holy Cross should, almost by definition, have no more personal ambition than to be a humble parish priest. Spada smiled at that.

As a trained lawyer his first appointment to the Holy See had been as an assistant to Cardinal Pietro Ciriaci, head of the Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts, the interpretive body for canon law. That had been the beginning, and he’d never looked back and never once regretted his long, sometimes vicious rise to the Red Hat and a seat in the College of Cardinals.

Father Thomas Brennan, head of Sodalitium Pianum, the Vatican Secret Service, came out through the open French doors of the villa and walked across the patio to where Spada was resting after his brief swim. It was early afternoon and the bright sun had turned the breeze-ruffled surface of the azure pool into a field of sparkling diamonds.

The pool area was absolutely secure, swept for electronic devices every day by Brennan’s people and surrounded by a tall hedge on three sides; the villa itself was protected by a high, spiked stone wall, security cameras, and armed members of the Corpo della Gendarmeria, the Vatican police.

As usual the pallbearer figure of the Irish priest was slightly hunched, as though the burdens of the world rested on his sloping shoulders like some cosmic coffin, and as usual he was smoking, a trail of cigarette ash sprinkled over the lapels of his cheap black suit. He sat down at Spada’s glass-topped, wrought iron patio table.