Templar 09 - Secret of the Templars Read online

  “He gained popularity during the Russian occupation and he was even backed by the CIA to foment as much sabotage and discontent as he could. They paid him a great deal of money to do it.”

  “That’s only part of the story,” said Raman. “Most of the money wasn’t spent the way the CIA intended. Opium has been cultivated in Afghanistan since 300 BC and it is so fundamental to the Afghan economy that the country would fall apart without it. Regardless of American attempts to eradicate the opium crop, Afghanistan is now the largest manufacturer of opium in the world.”

  “You’re saying that’s where Mullah Omar spent the money?” Holliday said.

  “Certainly,” said Raman. “He went from village to village buying their opium crop and was seen as being a patriot for supporting hundreds of small villages that would have suffered first under the Russians and then under the Americans. The more opium he purchased, the more he sold. The more he sold, the richer he got. The richer he got, the more opium he could buy. Omar now owns at least half the entire opium crop in Afghanistan and pays the individual growers in advance. Now that’s political and economic clout for you.”

  “And that was your plan? To buy all this opium from Omar?”

  “Yes, but not the same way Bapat is planning to do it. Bapat will buy as much opium as he can and sell it immediately on the wholesale market, making a quick profit. My intention was twofold. First, I would purchase as much of Omar’s crop as possible. And secondly, rather than selling it at once, I would warehouse it and wait for the market to rise.”

  “Which it would inevitably do as the sources dried up,” said Lazarus.

  “Precisely,” said Raman. “Eventually I would put Omar out of business.”

  “How would such a plan put him out of business?” Lazarus asked.

  “Because if I hold three-quarters of his crop and the people in the world of drug trading know it, he will have no one else to sell to. This does two things: I become the benefactor of the Afghan farmers, and as a result the Taliban’s power is impotent. Imagine how appreciative your government will be about that, Colonel Holliday. They will let me market my opium anywhere I want, except in the United States. A perfectly equitable deal, as far as I’m concerned.”

  “You sound pretty sure of yourself,” said Holliday. “Do you really think the United States government would agree to all of that?”

  Raman smiled. “They already have.”

  “You’ve got it all worked out, don’t you?”

  “Most of it.”

  “Except for the fact that you don’t have the scroll. Bapat does.”

  “Bapat is a pig but he is a cunning pig,” said Raman. “He will not have taken the scroll with him on this journey—only some small evidence that it exists and that it is in his possession.”

  “So what do you do now?”

  “Take it back from him.”

  * * *

  Cardinal Secretary of State Arturo Ruffino sat at the edge of Bruno Orsini’s swimming pool at his villa in Tuscany. Beside the cardinal there was a table loaded down with assorted fruits and cheeses and two tall sweating glasses of lemonade. Ruffino had been watching Orsini swim laps for almost fifteen minutes now. According to his wife, this was some sort of midafternoon ritual.

  With his exercise finally ended, the man climbed out of the pool. Orsini was of medium height with a potbelly and so much body hair that it was almost obscene. The burly man rubbed his hair with a towel, threw on a robe that was lying at the edge of the pool and draped himself in it. He sat down across the table from Ruffino, stabbed a slab of Asiago cheese and popped it into his mouth.

  “So, Your Eminence, what brings you so far from your holy roost in Rome?”

  “We have a serious problem, Signore Orsini.”

  “And what can P2 do to help?” Orsini replied.

  “P2” stood for Propaganda Due, a semifascist Masonic Lodge springing from Mussolini and his jackbooted Blackshirts. Even after Italy fell to the Americans, the British P2 continued to stockpile weapons of all kinds for what they assumed would be a new revolutionary battle for Italy. They became deeply involved with the CIA, and in the early fifties and sixties there were even plans for a CIA-backed coup of the communist government then in power. After being banned in 1976, Propaganda Due went underground once again. Since that time its activities were mainly criminal, although still closely associated with the Vatican.

  Orsini picked up a ripe peach and bit into it, the juice running down his chin. He chewed and swallowed, then wiped his face and lips with a napkin.

  “Usually when you come to us these days it’s to kill someone who’s causing you scandals and problems.”

  “I’m afraid it’s not that simple this time,” said Ruffino. He took a small sip of the lemonade. “This time Propaganda Due may well be the cause of the problem at hand.”

  “You came all this way just to insult me?” Orsini said coldly.

  “It is hardly an insult, my dear Orsini. As I understand it, your organization purchases more opium than anyone else in Europe. You ship that opium from Italy to Marseille, where it is then turned into heroin. The bulk of that heroin winds up in the United States, with a small portion going to England.”

  “What does that have to do with you or your church?” The anger was clear in Orsini’s voice now.

  “It has everything to do with the Church and your association with it. The Holy See is being blackmailed. Either we underwrite your purchases of opium in much larger quantities than you now purchase or an artifact will be made public that would almost certainly destroy the Holy Church’s credibility around the world.”

  “Why does that involve us? Nobody’s trying to blackmail Propaganda Due.”

  “What your criminal organization does is of little interest to me,” said Ruffino. “But now we have been tied together in a relationship almost as bad as the blackmail we now find ourselves fighting.”

  “I still don’t see what you want me to do,” said Orsini.

  “I want you and your thugs to do what they do best. I want them to find the blackmailer, find the scroll, find anybody else involved and wipe them off the face of the earth.”

  * * *

  The young lieutenant sitting at the video screen was named Martin Rooney. He was five foot nine, had large feet and barely possessed the physical qualifications necessary to be in the American armed forces. He was, however, an excellent video game player and had shelves of trophies in a small apartment in Indian Springs, Nevada, to prove it.

  He sat in front of a screen showing the view looking downward from a Predator 2 drone flying dangerously close to the Pakistan border. The drone had been covering the same spot for almost two hours. It was a small compound with a house and a single outbuilding, most likely a garage. The area beneath the drone looked completely unoccupied and there had been no movement for the entire time Rooney had been watching. Rooney’s acute eyesight had picked up fresh tire tracks with a wheelbase that probably meant a truck had been there. The tracks led directly to the outbuilding. It was late morning in Nevada, but the sun was setting over the compound in Afghanistan. Rooney was bored. Every now and again he’d take a bite from his Subway cold cut combo and a slurp from his long-melted extralarge grape Frosty.

  “An army of one, my ass,” Rooney muttered under his breath. The forty other young men in the darkened room were probably all of the same opinion. Sometimes it was extremely hard to concentrate on something you knew was taking place halfway around the world. The concentration was made even more difficult by the fact that nothing ever seemed to happen.

  * * *

  Covert ops chief Doug Kitchen sat beside a screen operator in the Afghan desk office on the second floor of CIA headquarters. He’d asked to be pinged when any resources were called up for relay to Russell Smart, which was exactly what he was watching now. The name of the man sitting at the screen
was Koppel. He was a nobody in the CIA, just like most of the Company’s staff. But little nothings like Koppel helped to gather up the bits and pieces of the puzzle for important people like Kitchen to analyze.

  “Mr. Smart ordered the predator run this morning. We’re watching it now,” said Koppel.

  “What’s the relay?” Kitchen asked.

  “An unregistered safe house in Arlington.”

  “Is there any chatter?” Kitchen asked.

  “Yes, sir, quite a bit. Computer and satellite telephone.”

  “Who’s getting the chatter and where is it being sent?” Kitchen asked.

  Koppel checked a second screen on his left. “It looks like Bombay.”

  “I want details on my desk within two hours,” said Kitchen. “Every damn word that goes in and out of that place in Arlington.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Koppel.

  Kitchen stood up, patted the man’s shoulder the way you would an obedient dog and went back to his solitary office on the fifth floor to think about what all this meant. He was getting a cold feeling in his fingertips.

  Something was going on in the Company—something he wasn’t privy to—and that would not do.

  21

  As soon as Koppel began monitoring the traffic between Rusty Smart and his men, most of whom were already in Mumbai, a strident alarm went off on his computer.

  Automatically every screen in the safe house blacked out except for the single machine he was transmitting on. Working quickly, he gathered up any papers implicating him or any of his people in any sort of off-campus operation. He sent a single line of text to all his people simultaneously, which was encrypted in a private coding that was particular to the Ghost Squad. That done, he set a series of booby traps in the safe house and left immediately.

  He went down into the garage of the building, took out two sets of keys and approached the green Range Rover that was his normal mode of transport and the only vehicle registered in his name.

  Once again he set a single booby trap under the front seat of the Range Rover and locked it up. He then went down one floor in the parking garage and fobbed open the doors of a four-year-old Toyota Corolla registered in the name of Arthur Brant, a resident of New York City. Brant was also the name on one of the passports in his attaché case and the one he would be using later tonight. He opened the trunk of the car, took out a set of New York plates and exchanged them for the Maryland plates the car usually carried. He then placed the old plates into the trunk, got in behind the wheel and drove out of the parking garage, heading northwest. Driving slightly above the speed limit, he expected to be at Chicago’s O’Hare International by midnight and in the air shortly thereafter.

  Back at Langley, Koppel noted the relay being dropped and also the flash message being sent out from the Arlington safe house. He flagged down a clerk and told him to take the message to cryptography. Koppel himself rode the elevator up to the fifth floor, a place he almost never visited. He found Kitchen’s office and told him what had happened. Kitchen dismissed him, got on the telephone and ordered a complete sweep of the Arlington safe house, telling the crew to take a demolition expert with them. It was standard tradecraft to booby-trap a facility being abandoned.

  Heaving a large sigh, Kitchen stood up, left his office and then walked down the long blue-carpeted hall to tell George Abramovich the bad news.

  * * *

  Holliday and Lazarus sat at the dining table in a suite at the Grand Sarovar. It was early morning and instead of enjoying the local cuisine Holliday and Lazarus had decided on eggs Benedict, orange juice and strong hot coffee.

  “We’re not actually thinking of going along with this, are we?” Lazarus asking, taking a piece of egg and swiping it through the hollandaise.

  Holliday sipped his coffee, his expression dark. “I don’t give a shit one way or the other about our Oxford-educated friend Mr. Raman or his lowlife opponent Bapat. The only thing that concerns me right now is that scroll. Peggy and Rafi died because of it and I’ll be damned if I’m going to let anyone use it to screw around with the opium market. All the heroin dealers and junkies in the world can go to hell. I just want the scroll.”

  “Easier said than done,” said Lazarus. “Who do we fight? Raman or Bapat? And what do we fight them with? These people have armies behind them.”

  “I can do better than an army,” said Holliday. “I’ve got Pat Philpot.”

  “Who?”

  “Potsy and I go back a long, long way,” said Holliday, smiling.

  Holliday had first met Patrick R. Philpot, otherwise know as Potsy, while on a Ranger operation in the Helmand Province of Afghanistan. Potsy was an intelligence officer, one who had his fingers in more pies than Holliday had ever seen before. He scavenged bits of unconnected information like old ladies gathered up string. They had run into each other again when Philpot was climbing the ladder of success at the newly constructed Counterterrorism Center not far from the Langley headquarters of the CIA. The next time they met was shortly after Holliday and Eddie had crashed a giant snowplow through the main entrance of the security gate of the U.S. embassy in Moscow.

  After finishing their breakfast, Holliday and Lazarus went down to the hotel’s business center and reserved a private cubicle fitted with a computer terminal, a printer and a satellite phone.

  “Watch this,” said Holliday. He punched out a series of numbers on the satellite phone. There were several buzzes and clicks and finally the ringing of a telephone.

  A groggy voice answered. “What?”

  “Potsy! It’s John Holliday.”

  “Do you know what damn time it is here?”

  “I thought you guys in Counterterrorism were ever vigilant.”

  “Vigilant, my ass. Whatever you want, the answer is no.”

  “Don’t be that way, Potsy,” Holliday said. “How many people know you’ve covered my ass for the snowplow thing?”

  “You said you’d never tell anyone about that.”

  “I lied.”

  “You’re blackmailing me?” Philpot said.

  “I wouldn’t call it blackmail. I’d call it a small nudge in a particular direction.”

  “What direction would that be?” said Philpot wearily.

  “I want you to send me your latest Onyx pictures on location of the Mullah Omar.”

  “There is no Onyx.”

  “Don’t be silly, Potsy. I know Onyx exists. You know Onyx exists. For God’s sake Wikipedia knows Onyx exists.”

  “Why do you need this material?”

  “Because I’m going to kill the son of a bitch,” said Holliday. “I never got to kill Bin Laden, so I thought I’d try my hand as the chief honcho of the Taliban.”

  “You’re out of your freaking mind,” said Philpot.

  “I’m crazy?” Holliday said. “You’re the man who’s pathologically obsessed with two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun. You don’t have blood in your veins—you have McNuggets.”

  “Why do you always bring this down to my eating habits?” Philpot said from eight thousand miles away.

  “Simple,” said Holliday. “Because the very mention of a Big Mac makes your teeth rattle and we both know that there is a twenty-four-hour McDonald’s exactly halfway between your apartment and the Counterterrorism Center. You send me the pictures, you go to McDonald’s, you have a couple of Big Macs and then you go home to bed, nobody the wiser.”

  “All right,” said Philpot, sighing. “Where do I send it?”

  Holliday gave him the IP number and e-mail address of the terminal in front of him.

  “Give me a couple of hours,” said Philpot.

  “An hour.”

  “An hour, then.”

  Holliday turned to Lazarus. “Put a Big Mac on the end of a hook and that guy would follow yo
u anywhere.”

  “So what do we do now?”

  “We wait for the pictures and then we go back to the Old Curiosity Shop.”

  * * *

  Hashim Bakshi’s face fell as Holliday and Lazarus returned to his shop. Holliday paused as he closed the door behind him and flipped over the “Closed” sign. As they approached the counter they could see Bakshi cringing.

  “Don’t worry, Bakshi. We haven’t told Raman or anybody else about our little conversation.” Bakshi’s expression brightened immediately, although there was still a wary look in his eyes.

  “What can I do for you this time?” the old man said.

  “Let’s make one thing perfectly clear before we begin. Not all the goods in this store came here legitimately and quite a few of them are fakes. Agreed?”

  Bakshi hesitated for a moment and then his shoulders sagged. “Agreed,” he replied.

  “How did they get here?” Lazarus asked.

  “I employ a number of fabricators in Mumbai who make copies of original antique furniture.”

  “And the rest?” Holliday asked.

  Bakshi shrugged his shoulders. “They’re smuggled.”

  “Do you smuggle things for other people?”

  “Yes,” said Bakshi.

  “Where do you smuggle these things from?”

  “Afghanistan, Pakistan. Sometimes even from China, and occasionally from Iran.”

  “Do you ever smuggle people?” Holliday asked.

  “Rarely,” said Bakshi.

  “How rare is rare?” Holliday asked.

  “Four, perhaps five times a year.”

  “From where?”

  “Afghanistan.”

  “How do you smuggle them?”

  “I don’t do it myself. I know someone who does.”

  “How does he do it?” Lazarus asked.

  “I have never asked about his methods. He is a Pakistani gentleman named Haji Ayub Afridi.”

  “Where do we find Afridi?”

  “Look for him at the border crossing at Chaman. He has a rice and textile exporting company on Khandari Road.”