The Templar Concordat (21 page)

“If it’s that bad, why keep the thing around?” Callahan waved at the drawers of manuscripts. “Why not just get rid of it if it’s that bad? I mean, what’s the good of keeping something in a library if nobody can look at it?”

Marie looked around the room. “You know much about library management? I mean, how they run a place like this?”

“I understand the software, but I don’t know anything about how they really utilize it or how they manage a collection.”

“This is a sorting room here. Isn’t that what your security system called it, too? Anyway, this is where they take things when they have to figure out what to do with them. They usually bring the stuff in, sort it all out, then move it in one shot. So it’s all here for a while. The stuff in here has to be looked at to see how and where it fits. Maybe some of it doesn’t even belong in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Century Papal collection. They might…”

“Are you trying to say,” Callahan interrupted, “that they might not know what they had?”

“I don’t know. It happens in libraries all the time. And this is probably the oldest library in the world, oldest in the West at least.”

“But someone put it in the computer and took an image.”

“Sure they did. But the technicians’ job is to take pictures, enter the manuscripts into the computer, then put the originals in these drawers. They work much too fast to take the time to read everything. Much of what they deal with takes a long time for even an expert to get through.”

“Bottom line,” said Callahan, “is we don’t know if they knew what they had. Maybe they didn’t.”

“Right.”

Marie punched the air. “But damn it, Callahan. We found this thing. Well, maybe we didn’t find it, but at least we know where it was. I’m going to call my boss, the Templar Chief Archivist.”

 “Ok. I’ll call the Marshall. Jean Randolph just got a lot more important, I think.”

“We could always ask Santini about the treaty,” Marie said.

“Sure we could, but if he’s trying to cover up, I’d rather know more than we do now before approaching him. Santini is smart, but like almost everyone in the world, he doesn’t really suspect how much he can be tracked by these computers. He thinks logging is turned off here, so there is no record. Right now, there’s no reason to let him know he’s wrong.”

Dhahran, Saudi Arabia - Friday, March 27

It was a half-hour drive from King Fahd International Airport to Hammid’s villa on the eastern shore of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and he looked forward to some rest, not glad handing an idiot.

He still wasn’t sure why he wasn’t dead. That little guy walked into the café, shot Saad, and ignored Hammid and Jean. But Hammid and the treaty were now safe in Saudi Arabia, and that’s what mattered. Still, he didn’t understand what had happened, and he didn’t like that at all.

“Allahu Akhbar! God be praised! God be praised!” Abdullah danced around like a fool.

“Can you believe it, Hammid? Can you believe it? We have smashed the enemies of God in the heart of their foul den. In the Vatican! The Pope! We have blown the Pope into so many pieces they’ll have to mop him up! All of them! Dead!”

Abdullah pumped his arms and grinned.  “Oh, and what a great party we had to celebrate! And the Filipina whores! Oh, yes!”

Great victory, thought Hammid. Blowing up a thousand old people is a great victory. That’s how far we have fallen. But he had to deal with these people, so he had to put on the act.

Hammid al Dossary beamed at Abdullah. “Yes, my friend, we did it. We struck in the name of God and the whole world now trembles in fear of what we can do.” He grabbed the much larger Abdullah by both shoulders and feigned a kiss on both cheeks. “And you, Abdullah, your name will be remembered for a thousand years, and your sons and their sons will be honored for generations to come.”

Abdullah looked over at the Sky News satellite TV broadcast from the Vatican and suddenly wrinkled his forehead and frowned. “And our good friend Ibrahim. He did it. We must never forget what he did. How proud he must have been standing alone among his enemies, standing strong, standing for God. Ibrahim is truly the greatest of the greats.” Abdullah looked like he might squeeze out a tear.

Hammid eyed Abdullah, nodded sadly, and looked downward. And your time will come, too, my friend Abdullah, he thought. Your time to strap on the vest full of C4 is coming. Your time to walk among the enemy and push the little red button. Your time to be a hero. Your time to be proud. Your time to stop sending others. Your time to smite the enemies of God. And my time to get rid of your stupid, drunken carcass. But not yet. Not yet.

Hammid turned and walked out of the air-conditioned house onto the wide balcony overlooking the Arabian Gulf. On the other side, he thought, they called it the Persian Gulf. The hot, humid air of the gulf breeze instantly condensed on his cooler skin, and drops ran straight down his sunglasses. In thirty seconds his Armani print shirt was damp, not with perspiration, but with the humidity carried by that stifling breeze. 

He leaned his elbows on the marble railing, looked east and sniffed the air. The water was calm. It was always calm. And the brown desert stretched north and south from the estate walls surrounding its clipped green lawns and putting greens. The water to keep them green came from the desalination plant fifty miles to the north, a true marvel of modern engineering. In this case it was American engineering, but it was Saudi oil money that paid the Americans. The Americans were clever people, and they would do anything for money. And the Saudis? He smiled. They were not very clever, but would pay money for anything, and God forbid they do it themselves. He really wasn’t sure who was screwing who.

The Dhahran headquarters of Saudi Aramco was thirty minutes north, and the giant Abqaiq oil processing center lay to the south. And it was just off these shores, he had been told, that the American geologists looking west from the deck of their ship had first noticed the very gradual and uniform slope of the land from west to east. Over millions of years the oil had migrated and settled in the Ghawar field, the Saudis’ Golden Goose.

Americans. Damn them. Why did Americans and not Arabs find it? And why did Americans developed it? And why did Americans provide the advanced technology to keep the aging field in production? And why did the largest oil company in the world recruit Texans for its most skilled positions? Why did Arab students study science and engineering in America rather than in Arab nations? Why did the best Arab students stay in the West? 

The answers were simple. The Americans could do it, and the Arabs couldn’t. The British could do it. The Germans could do it. The Japanese could do it. And now even the Chinese could do it. The Arabs mattered to the rest of the world only because they sat on top of all that oil. Ragheads. Sand niggers. WOGS. Pests. Disposable.

His people had become lazy, lost their spirit, watching rather than shaping world events. But that would change. Again, he thought how the Arabs once led the world in science, literature, religion, mathematics, and medicine. The world bent its knee to the universities in Damascus, Cairo, and Baghdad. But that was once, long ago. But the time was coming, the time when the world would again recognize God’s natural order.

But first the Arabs needed a wake-up call. They needed to realize who they were.

Bombing churches wouldn’t do it, hijacking airplanes wouldn’t do it, and killing people in pizza parlors wouldn’t do it. Those were all the actions of cowards. That brought contempt, not respect. None of these could reach in, squeeze the heart, and grab the spirit of the people. None could put a hand around their throats and shake them from their stupor. But the time was coming when he would pick up the whole Muslim world and force it to see reality. Force it to look at its ancient enemies in the West. Force it confront the West and say, “No.”  It was coming. And who were the natural leaders of the Muslims? The Arabs, of course. The Treaty of Tuscany was the key to all that.

He could see the people below parading on the beach. A Saudi man strutted in a long white thobe and checkered gutra on his head. He eyed the compound, but pretended he didn’t. His wife followed in a black head-to-toe abaya that covered everything but her face and hands. Hammid felt sorry for the women. It was one hundred and twelve degrees and she was out in the sun shuffling through the sand in a big black bag. The kids followed, like kids anywhere, laughing and running in the surf. It would take a few more years for them to adopt the strict mores that knit Saudi society together. A few more years of freedom. A typical family wrapped up for a day at the beach.

Zurich - Friday, March 27

The Templar Master’s phone rang late at his house on Lake Zurich. “Well, are you going to ask me?”

“Ask you what, Patrick?” sighed the Master. What did the Archivist want now?

“Aren’t you going to ask me how the thieving crooks knew the treaty was just sitting there begging to be stolen?”

The Master confronted his own stupidity. How, indeed, did they know?

“Marie pretty much nailed it. She found entries for the thing in the Vatican Library. She gave us some index numbers and we narrowed our search.”

Silence. “And what did you find, Patrick?”

“It’s on the damn Internet. A compendium of interlibrary listings of new additions to about five hundred major research libraries. Page after page, indexed and sorted by library, department, blah, blah, blah.”

“What’s it say?”

“Say? It says Treaty of Tuscany, 1189, Vatican Library. Evaluation. Some temporary catalog numbers. It’s a few lines of text hidden in a thousand pages. A needle in a hay stack.”

“Who gets the list?”

“Who gets it? Who do you think get it? Libraries. Universities. That’s why I get it. Some Vatican idiot listed it without knowing what it was. Probably don’t even know they did it. For all I know, the computers did it all by themselves. That’s an option on their system.”

“Is the entry still on the internet?” asked the Master.

“Good God, no. We got the computer whiz kids over in your cellar to hack the hosting computers and erase it. No point letting anyone else know what we know. Knowledge is power.”

“Ok, Patrick, if you dig up anything else let me know.”

“Let you know? You bony French toad!  Open your eyes, man. Think.”

The Master owed the old Archivist a lot, but there was a time to draw the line. “Patrick, either get to the point or I’m hanging up the phone.”

“Hang up? Hang up at your own peril. Has it occurred to you that someone had to know about the treaty before that line in the index could even have any meaning to them? They had to know enough to realize it was worth stealing? Know what it said?”

The Archivist stopped to let his words sink in, then softly said, “And just who might have been around long enough to know that? Just who might have mention of it in their own archives? And just who might love to get their diseased claws on it? Just who might have web crawlers burrowing through the Internet looking for a reference? Just who might that be?”

Hashashin. The Master wondered if he or the Irishman should be Grand Master. He sure hadn’t been thinking clearly.

The Archivist had the knife in and couldn’t resist a twist. “So, now I’ll leave you to think your great strategic thoughts, with the ancient foe so far ahead of us, planning God knows what mischief. And, you know, you’re supposed to be the brains of this outfit. And none of you thought to ask the simple questions. Mental midgets, all of you. Brains like BBs in a boxcar. See, I’m still pulling your chestnuts out of the fire. Heaven help us. Not like the old days, no, not at all. Have to get my little knives out before…”

The Master clicked the phone off.

France - Sunday, March 29

Every few seconds a telephone pole flashed by his glum reflection in the train window. Everything else was pitch-black. Well, he was in a fine fix now, and it was all his own doing.

While the rest of the Templar operatives were redeploying for strikes, real strikes, against the Hashashin and Al Qaeda, Callahan was taking the night train from Zurich to London chasing pieces of paper. He wasn’t chasing terrorists, he wasn’t bringing the fight to the enemy, and he wasn’t doing what he had been trained to do at great expense to the US government. No. Now he was chasing after a paper like a mad librarian after an overdue book. And he didn’t know anything about that stuff.

“Screw your head back on for a minute and think,” the Marshall had told him. They were in the Templar Archives under the Kruger Institute in Zurich. “You’re the one who suspected that bishop at the library was holding back, and you were right. You’re the one who recognized DeLarossa was moving in on a target sitting in the café with the two library thieves. Right again. You’re the one who got Marie Curtis involved and found out they took the treaty. Right again. Marie’s the one who knew Randolph, and that never would have happened without you.”

The Marshal cracked his knuckles and pointed at Callahan. “And I’m right to keep you on this because you’re the one who has a feel for it. To put it real simple, we want to know what that treaty says, really says. And then we might or might not want to get our hands on it. Maybe we’ll just leave it in play. Depends on what it says. We don’t want to take this Randolph woman because we don’t want to tip our hand. First, we want you find out exactly what the damn thing says. I’m sure she knows. Second, find out where it is. She’s the link to that. That’s it. We have the best chance of getting it with you. Case closed.”