The Templar Legion

soldiers, gathered to watch the show.

“?El bastardo sadica!?Se va a quemar a continuacion, darles de comer a los cocodrilos!?Malos matar al puta madre!” Eddie muttered, furious, his dark eyes flashing with anger. His big fists clenched and the vein in his forehead was beating like a drum.

“Not if I kill him first,” said Holliday.

“With what?” Salamango laughed, overhearing them. “Do you know what those people out there in those boats said when we came into their village and began burning their houses and raping their daughters? They said that they were protected by the gods. They were protected by the umufo omhloshana; you know what that means?”

“The pale strangers,” said Eddie.

“That’s right, black man, Pale Strangers.” Salamango let out a huge rumble of laughter. “Well, my friends, you are the only pale strangers I see around here and I don’t see much protection going on.” He barked an order and the boy with Peggy’s camera came forward. Salamango gave another order and the boy reluctantly handed the camera over to Peggy and stepped back.

“You take the pictures when I tell you and you don’t stop until I tell you; understand, little white woman? Don’t start or stop before I tell you or I’ll rip you in half where you stand.” He grinned. “I want to make postcards to send to the United Nations.”

Rafi took a single lurching step forward but Holliday jammed his foot down painfully on the archaeologist’s instep. Peggy was crying now, tears streaming down her cheeks.

“Why do you want to do this?” she asked. “Why?”

The man in the Knicks shirt stared down at her, lip curled. “I had a brother and his name was Felicianos and he was eight years old. They came into our village one night and killed almost everybody. They left Felicianos till the end and then they chopped off his orgao and threw it into the fire and then threw him in after it. They were FNLA, these people, Frente Nacional para a Libertacao de Angola, Portuguese with American arms, because America was afraid that Angola would become Marxist.”

“That was terrible, but no reason to do this,” pleaded Peggy.

“I do terrible things to show how terrible I am,” Salamango explained. “More terrible than the pigs who killed my brother by a thousand times. I do it for a million Felicianos.”

Eddie spit on the bloody ground. “You do it because you like it, cabron,” he said. “I know your type; I’ve smelled them before. They stink of their own anger and take it out on the world.”

“I’ll second that,” said Holliday.

Salamango sneered. “You people with your democracies and your communism, you don’t understand how the game is played here. Here, in my Africa, the leader is the man who is feared among his tribe and any other tribe; the man who is feared is the man who kills; and the man who is feared most and has the most power is the man who kills most. It has been that way for ten thousand years and it will be that way for another ten thousand or until we are all dead. That is Africa, little girl, and anyone who tells you other than that is white or a liar, and probably both.”

He turned and raised his fist. He called out a single word: “Kuf-wa!”

On the dugout the boy at the outboard tossed something into the nearest of the fishing boats. There was no immediate flame, just a heat ripple in the air that distorted the screaming figures on the first boat. The dugout set the fishing boats adrift and the first people, their clothes and flesh on fire, leaped over the side to be devoured by the waiting crocodiles. Within less than a minute the water around the flaming boats was a frothing red horror of blood and snapping bones.

And then it began.

The first dart, whether by accident or design, struck Salamango in the right eye, burying itself in the orb, leaving nothing outside the body except a narrow white cone of what appeared to be ordinary paper. The second dart struck him in the cheek, the long metal tip piercing from side to side with the cone on the left and the flattened diamond-shaped point coming out the other side. The points appeared to be coated with some sort of black, tarry substance.

Holliday turned on his heel and watched as all four of the armed children guarding them were also struck, each one more than once, the bright white cones appearing in faces, backs, chests and bellies.

The effects of the darts were instantaneous: paralysis, choking, convulsions, a strychnine-like arching of the back, foaming at the mouth and then complete loss of sphincter control followed almost immediately by death.

Holliday, Peggy, Rafi and Eddie were the only people left untouched. Out on the river, the dugout drifted. The boy who had torched the sailboats was draped over the gunwale as two crocodiles fought to pull his corpse into the water.

The sailboats themselves were smoldering hulks, their occupants either burned to death or dragged down to the muddy bottom by the giant reptiles. The whole thing had been silent and from the first dart in Salamango’s eye to the last child’s death had taken only seconds. Not a word had been said; not a shot had been fired.

With her camera Peggy began taking photos of the bizarre killing ground all around them. Suddenly she stopped; her hands were shaking too hard. Holliday followed her stunned gaze. Men began to appear from the jungle, scores of them, all dressed in ornately folded linen loincloths that looked like pleated kilts and sandals, their thongs crisscrossed up to the knee in a familiar design. They carried five- or six-foot-long bamboo tubes in their hands and short quivers on their belts for the long, cone-ended darts.

Some of the men wore crested wooden helmets with leather cheek flaps, the crests made from some kind of stiffened animal-hair bristle, while others wore simple linen coifs to match the kiltlike loincloths. The strangest thing about them was their color-a tanned light brown like heavily creamed coffee. Their hair was dark and straight, their features definitely Caucasian rather than negroid. Most startling of all, Holliday could see that some of the oddly dressed men had blue eyes.

“Umufo omhloshana,” Eddie said quietly.

Holliday nodded. “The Pale Strangers.”

22

There was a knock on Sir James Matheson’s office door.

“Enter!”

Allen Faulkener stepped into the lavish office and stood in front of Matheson’s desk. “Leonhard Euhler is dead,” he said stiffly.

“Christ!” Matheson said. “How?”

“Some sort of homosexual tryst, as far as the Swiss police are concerned. Love letters, suicide note.”

Matheson sat rigidly behind his desk, palms spread on its smooth empty surface. He thought for a moment, then leaned down, pulled open the humidor drawer of the desk and took out a Romeo y Julieta Short Churchill Robusto.

He closed the drawer carefully, then took a gold Dunhill cutter-punch combination out of his waistcoat pocket and prepared the cigar for smoking. He sat back in his chair and lit the cigar with a matching Dunhill lighter, all the while trying to maintain his composure in front of Faulkener. It didn’t do to let the hired help see the master afraid, and for the first time in a long time that was exactly what Sir James Matheson was-afraid.

Matheson wasn’t much of a believer in luck or happenstance. Whatever evidence the Swiss police had in hand he couldn’t quite bring himself to believe that Euhler would pick this particular moment to snuff out his lights for some idiotic love affair. He could sense the first small cracks in his plan, but if his intuition was right, who was responsible, and how did he stop the cracks from getting worse?

“No signs of foul play?”

“Apparently not. Pills, the love letters, as I mentioned. The man who wrote the letters died in a car accident.”

“Recently?”

“Six years ago.”

Why would a man, poof or not, kill himself over the death of a lover six years ago? It was making less and