Valley of the Templars (30 page)

After rounding Punta Brave, the Corazon de Leon puttered slowly southwest heading for the shallow channel between tiny Cayo Boca Chica at the end of its much larger brother, Cayo Fagoso, on the port side and Cayo Frances to starboard. Beyond was the open sea. Geraldo and his son, Ricardo, stopped the engines briefly beside an old wreck of a molasses ship, the SS
San Pasqual
, blown onto the reef in 1939.

The crystallized molasses still threw off a terrible odor, but the old concrete ship was exactly the kind of place where you caught the best lobster and it took less than twenty minutes for the father-and-son team to bring up several dozen of the enormous creatures. It also gave them a chance to see if anyone had shown any interest in their leave-taking.

Eddie and the two Cuban lobstermen met briefly on deck, and then Eddie reported back to the little galley aft of the wheelhouse. “They say that from here we can go two ways: to Key West or to Billy’s
Cay in the Bahamas. If we go to Key West we have to travel along the coast for more than seventy miles, but Billy’s Cay is one hundred and seventy miles and almost due north. They are suggesting Billy’s Cay and ask for your thoughts on this.”

“How long before we’re beyond the twelve-mile limit?”

“From the wreck…perhaps forty-five minutes.”

“No sign of the Zhuk patrol boat?”

“Nothing. The sea is ours.”

“I agree with Geraldo and Ricardo. We head for Billy’s Cay.”

“Bueno.”
Eddie nodded. He turned and left the galley.

“Time to get to work,” said Holliday.

Paul Smith, senior analyst and interpreter for the Central American Division of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, sat in his small office in the new Fort Belvoir complex. It was Saturday, Smith’s usual day for golf, but here he was, at the express order of Mrs. Leticia goddamn Long, director of the agency, to repurpose the new GeoEye 2 satellite as well as run a series of four overlapping and continuous RQ-170 drones over Cuba. The RQ-170 was tasked to fly at mid altitudes, but it was felt that although one had been recently brought down by the Iranians, the
Cuban electronic defenses were not sophisticated enough to cause any problems. He had six computers running simultaneously on his workdesk and a huge eighty-inch monitor on the wall giving him a larger, high-definition view from GeoEye 2.

To make matters worse, not only was he to retask the satellite and oversee the drone flights out of Creech, but he was to personally maintain twenty-four-hour surveillance and see to it that there was always someone watching the screens. Under no circumstances was he to leave the gigantic building, which meant some kind of hideous dinner in the food fair mall in the Atrium and a night in one of the “suites” the agency maintained for just this kind of situation. The “suites” were somewhere short of a room at a Motel Six. It was worse than being an on-call intern in a hospital. Smith yawned and let his eyes flicker back and forth across the screens with an occasional glance at the big screen on the wall. His headache was getting worse by the minute. It was going to be a long day and an even longer night.

Father Thomas Brennan sat at one of the small tables outside the Osteria Dell’Angelo on the Via G. Bettolo, eating a small plate of
ciambelline
aniseed doughnut-style biscuits and enjoying a glass of sweet Vin Santo dessert wine after a pleasant dinner.
Finishing the last of the biscuits, he lit a cigarette and watched the traffic squeeze down the narrow roadway a few blocks from the Holy City.

All in all, the Irish priest was feeling quite content. He had photocopied Spada’s personal medical file to those concerned and was now waiting for the almost certain results.

Spada had less than a year, and probably no more than six months, left to live, which would give Musaro plenty of time to establish himself to take over the position. He chuckled to himself; the pope was primed, so to speak. With Musaro in position—a much more aggressively active man in the role of Vatican secretary of state Soladitum Pianum and the entire Vatican intelligence apparatus would finally be used to assert its real potential.

The endless sex scandals, the Vatican Bank scandal and the cloud that still hung over the death of John Paul I—a plan Brennan had advised against from the beginning—had all conspired to lower the Vatican’s prestige and political power. Now, with Spada gone and the Holy Father seriously thinking of resigning, perhaps that would change. Within the next year or so, there was going to be a shift in power in the Vatican and Brennan was assuring himself a position on the winning side.

Finishing his cigarette, Brennan lit another, waved to Angelo, the retired rugby player and owner of the
restaurant, and walked back to his little apartment on the Via Mazzini. He stopped off at the Caffè Della Rosa for a final espresso and made a quick call on his cell phone. Twenty minutes later he reached his building and trudged up the three flights of stairs to his apartment.

He quickly stripped off his clothes, took a quick shower and put on the old velvet robe and slippers that were his usual form of dress when he was at home. Fifteen minutes later, there was the shrill sound of his doorbell and without even switching on the intercom he buzzed the downstairs door open. A few moments later, there was a quiet knock at his door and he let his guest in. As usual it was Mai Phuong Thúy, his favorite, the compact portable massage table almost as big as she was.

“Bu
i t
i cha tôt,”
she said politely.

“And a good evening to you, as well, my dear,” the priest answered. He stepped aside to let her pass, then followed her down the short hall to his comfortable book-lined living room. She set up the massage table, draped a sheet over it, then helped Brennan remove his robe and slippers.

He climbed up onto the table, facedown, while Mai took her oils out, and then he gave in to forty-five minutes of her excellent ministrations. At the end of the forty-five minutes, the massage stopped and Mai disappeared into the one-bedroom apartment’s
kitchen. Brennan heard the pinging of the microwave oven that meant she was heating her small towels. It was his signal to roll over on his back, which he did.

The microwave pinged again and a few seconds later the Irish priest heard the small sound of Mai’s feet on the living room rug. He closed his eyes and she laid one of the towels over his face. A few seconds after that, her hand began to massage his flaccid organ, magically arousing it to all of its five-and-a-half-inch hooded length.

“Không c
m th
y ng
i cha t
t?”
Mai asked.

“Wonderful,” wheezed Brennan, his voice thick with pleasure.

“Jak to cítí, zrádce?”
said Daniella Kay Pesek, the widow of Czech assassin-for-hire named Antonin Pesek, the man who had been hired by Brennan less than a year ago to kill John Holliday and who had failed, dying in the process. Daniella slipped her usual weapon, a seven-inch hard plastic hairpin, into Brennan’s right ear, penetrating the outer ear, then penetrating the middle ear and finally through the temporal bone to the brain via the internal auditory nerve canal.

The movement was almost surgical in its precision, and it killed Thomas Brennan instantly. She gave the hairpin a swift circular twist and then withdrew it quickly. There wasn’t even a drop of blood. “Can you clean up?” Daniella said to Mai in passable
Vietnamese. She handed the woman an envelope containing the twenty-five-thousand-dollar fee requested.

“T
t nhiên.”
Mai nodded.