Red Templar

tell you. It says, ‘The Gospel of Yeshua ben Yusef.’ You know who he was, at least, surely.”

Holliday knew. He stood stunned beside his weeping friend. Yeshua ben Yusef had been Christ’s name as a man. If the book Genrikhovich held in his hands was literally Christ’s own words as written by himself in the years before his death-or, Holliday thought, after his supposed crucifixion-if they were the words of a man and not a god, then those words would have more real power than anything dreamed up for a Hollywood movie or in the beakers of horrors at the Almaty Biological Weapons Facility in Kazakhstan, so short of money now that they kept their supplies of anthrax in old coffee cans.

“Come!” Genrikhovich offered generously, waving his hand in Holliday’s direction. “Leave the crying nigger and I’ll show you.”

“?Basta ya!”Enough! Eddie roared. “?Es suficiente, pedazo de mierda inutil ruso!”

Holliday didn’t have any time at all to react.

Tears still streamed down Eddie’s cheeks, but his sorrow had turned to rage. He came out of his crouching position on the floor like a sprinter leaving his blocks, a deep guttural groan growing in his throat like some enraged animal finally, at long last, unleashed. He vaulted over the chests of treasure, heading for the Russian, who now stood frozen, wide eyed with fear as the big Cuban thundered toward him, blood in his eyes.

“Eddie! No!” Holliday yelled, taking off after his friend. Genrikhovich suddenly remembered the Tokarev and fumbled for it on the podium, horrified when he couldn’t find it. Eddie was getting closer by the second, the growl had now grown to a full-fledged bellow of sustained demonic fury.

“?Basta ya!” he yelled again.

Genrikhovich dropped to his knees and scrabbled through the broken pieces of the Ark on the floor. He found the pistol and stumbled to his feet just as Eddie reached him. He pulled the trigger but nothing happened.

No round in the chamber; amateur’s mistake, thought Holliday as he charged after Eddie. Lucky.

Eddie tackled the man shoulder-high and they went down, bringing the rest of the Ark with them in a cascade of splintering wood and thin gold sheeting. The Russian made a screeching sound and then the pistol went off with a muffled roar.

“Eddie!” Holliday yelled hoarsely.

Genrickovich clambered to his feet, the Tokarev held shakily in one hand. A lens of his glasses was shattered, and there was blood all over the front of his shirt. He aimed the gun downward and hauled back on the hammer. “Die, you black bastard!”

Holliday didn’t hesitate for a second. He slid Octanis from its golden sheath, raised it above his head and brought it down in a single deadly blow. The brilliantly worked Damascus blade did exactly as it was meant to do, slicing down through skin, flesh, muscle sinew and bone, taking off the Russian’s arm at the shoulder. Genrikhovich’s arm, Tokarev still clenched in the fist, cartwheeled up and away in a fountain spray of arterial blood that drenched everything, including the book open on the podium. The arm finally landed somewhere in the middle of the chamber with a thump and a clatter.

“My arm,” said Genrikhovich almost calmly, staring at the end of his shoulder. The spray was now a pumping mass of veins and arteries that squirmed like trapped snakes with their heads lopped off. “My arm is gone,” said the Russian, his voice sounding a little surprised and confused. “You’ll have to put it back on.”

Genrikhovich took two steps forward and tried to grip the podium with both hands to support himself. Unfortunately one of the hands was no longer there.

“Please?” Genrikhovich said, and then fell down hard. Holliday had seen wounds like this in Vietnam and Afghanistan-men whose nervous systems continued on for a few seconds when by rights they should have been dead. Holliday looked down at the body on the floor. He was dead now. His arm had pretty much stopped bleeding.

Holliday crouched down, attending to Eddie. He rolled the man over on his back and saw a large red stain on the lower left quadrant of his chest. It wasn’t sucking and there was no bloody froth on his lips, so it wasn’t a lung. Spleen or kidney, maybe. Not as bad as a lung but bad enough.

“Can you walk?”

“I think so.” Eddie nodded weakly.

“Hang on for a second.” He turned, slipped off Genrikhovich’s gory backpack, then stuffed the book inside it. He shrugged on the backpack and eased himself upward, one arm around Eddie’s armpit, the other holding his elbow. After a few seconds the Cuban stood, a little unsteadily.

“Okay?” Holliday asked.

“Okay.” Eddie nodded and they headed for the door. They reached it and stepped into the outer chamber. In the distance above them Holliday could hear the sound of boot heels on stone steps.

“Great,” he muttered. It was probably the Spetsnaz team they’d almost run into earlier. Not that it made much difference now; going back the way they’d come was too long and too difficult anyway, and he had to get Eddie into a doctor’s care as quickly as possible. He helped the Cuban across the chamber to the iron gate leading into the Saint Basil’s tunnel and booted it in. The gate tore away easily on rusted-out hinges and the two men stepped into the dark passage.

37

Holliday and Eddie stumbled down the brick-lined tunnel, the way ahead lit only by the dimming lights of their helmet lamps. Each time they hit a crumbling brick on the floor and tripped, Eddie groaned with pain. There was almost no blood on the makeshift compress Holliday had applied to the wound, but Eddie seemed to be getting weaker with every step, and Holliday was beginning to worry about internal bleeding.

He also worried about their immediate future. Arrest by the Spetsnaz squad would be a death sentence. He’d had a brief encounter with one of their teams in Afghanistan back in the days when the United States was backing the Taliban as “freedom fighters,” and they were definitely of the “shoot first and don’t bother to ask questions at all” school of warfare.

A Russian hospital would be almost as bad. A Cuban with a bullet in his belly brought into one of their emergency wards by an American ex-military would have the FSB sniffing around within an hour, and then all hell would break loose. The book or whatever it was he was hauling around on his back only made things worse.

If the volume really was Christ’s own gospel and not an interpretation and transliteration of his words written years and perhaps centuries after his death, then it would be the equivalent of a hydrogen bomb going off in the world of religion. Evangelical churches whose entire existence was based on “decoding” and interpreting the words of Christ would collapse overnight. The fundamental tenets and faith of the Catholic Church would almost certainly be called into question, and the “deconstruction” of a figure seen as a god or even as “the Son of God” could send shock waves through all of Christendom. The actual content of the gospel would eventually tell the tale.

Were the gospels the considered, thoughtful religious philosophy of an enlightened, brilliantly intelligent mind, or the rants and raves of a roving holy man with wild delusions of grandeur, a revolutionary turn of phrase and an innate ability to irritate and anger the rich and powerful? Not that it mattered, really; right now the last thing anyone needed was more fuel to feed an already violent mistrust among the great religions of the world.

From somewhere behind them Holliday heard a distant, drawn-out scream and he smiled. At least one of the Spetsnaz team had been impaled on Ivan the Terrible’s tiger trap. One less for him to deal with.

As they moved on down the corridor, Eddie seemed to be leaning more and more heavily on him.

“What’s wrong, compadre?” Holliday asked.

“Muy cansado, mi amigo, muy cansado,” answered Eddie in a mumble.

“Cansado, tired?”

“Si, very tired.”

“We can rest for a minute,” offered Holliday.

“Just a little minute.” Eddie sighed, sinking down to the dusty brick floor. Seated, Holliday crouched down beside him and gently peeled back the rear of his jacket. There was no blood on the back of his shirt. No exit wound, which meant he was almost surely bleeding internally. Holliday grimaced. How far from the chamber to the Saint Boris cathedral? Two hundred yards, three. They’d gone less than half that in almost fifteen minutes, and he