Valley of the Templars

“He didn’t say anything else?” Patchin asked, looking at Will Black, the MI6 liaison.

“No, sir, nary a word,” said Black.

“Did we threaten him, Miss Pilkington?”

“Yes, sir. Guantanamo and letting him go in Little Havana in Miami with a sign around his neck. We even threatened to send him back to Havana.”

“Didn’t work?” Patchin asked glumly.

“No, sir. He clammed up entirely.”

“What about Guantanamo, Kingman?”

“The president would have our balls, I’m afraid, sir.”

“Never been a fan of bowdlerizing,” murmured Black. Carrie smiled.

“What?” Kingman asked.

“Nothing,” said Black. “Just thinking out loud.”

“What about a black house—somewhere really unpleasant?”

“There’s still one in operation in Albania, sir.”

“What do you think, Black? A little boarding, sensory deprivation, that kind of thing?”

“I seriously doubt that it would do any good, Mr. Patchin.”

“And why is that?”

“Because I don’t think he has anything more to say.”

“You believe Miss Pilkington’s ‘messenger’ theory, too?” Kingman sneered.

“I do. I also believe that Selman-Housein was given just enough information by the Brotherhood to get you to react exactly the way you are now. You’ve got half the threat analysts at Counterintelligence wetting their pants and looking for exactly what sort of terrorist threat from Cuba could cause the death of hundreds of thousands of people, and you’ve got everyone at Homeland Security running around defenestrating themselves.”

“De what?” Kingman asked.

“Defenestration,” said Carrie, “a fourteen-letter word meaning to be thrown out of a window. It’s what happened to Jezebel, the false prophet from the Old Testament who used too much makeup. You see it every now and again in the New York Times crossword puzzle.”

Black smiled. Kingman was silent, staring. Patchin raised an eyebrow.

“The president isn’t about to throw himself out of an Oval Office window, even if he could, which he can’t, but he would like some suggestions about the direction we should take.”

“Holliday and Cabrera, his Cuban friend, are the key to all this. They’re looking for Cabrera’s brother, Domingo. Domingo fled because he knew too much. Find Holliday and we find Domingo Cabrera.”

Patchin thought for a moment. “It’ll do until we think of something better. How’s your Spanish, Black?”

“Fluent,” he answered.

“Yours, Miss Pilkington?”

“High school and a course in conversational Spanish at university.”

“We can’t send either one of them!” Kingman protested. “He’s not one of ours and she’s just an…analyst.” Kingman looked shocked at the very thought.

“Mr. Black is as American as you or me. His mother spent most of her working life at the agency.”

“But…”

“Done a lot of fieldwork, have we, Rufus?” Patchin said.

“No, sir, none.”

“Speak any Spanish?”

“Not much, sir. I’ve been to Cancun two or three times.”

Patchin turned to Black. “You’ll be a journalist for the London Times. Miss Pilkington, as well. She’s an expat Canadian. Can your people in London arrange a backstory?”

“Not a problem,” said Black.

“Fly to the Bahamas tonight and catch a flight from Nassau to Havana as soon as you can. We need answers, and we need them fast.”

13

The bow of the Tiburon Blanco pounded up and down on the wind-ruffled water of the Rio Agabama as Eddie threw the wheel around, guiding the old cruiser downriver toward the oncoming pirate flatboats. They were firing again, but either the range was too long or they simply had bad aim.

Above him on the flybridge, Holliday squinted into the bright sun reflecting off the river in almost blinding shards of light. He held on to the old wooden traversing handles, both thumbs resting on the long “wishbone” trigger. The Browning M2 had a range of better than a mile, but Holliday wasn’t taking any chances. At a hundred and fifty yards he saw the man with the RPG on his shoulder stand in the bow of one of the oncoming flatboats. Holliday traversed slightly to the left, then pressed on the spoon-shaped ends of the trigger.

The effect was almost instantaneous. In the first five seconds, sixty-five rounds chattered loudly out of the old gun. Shell casings flew while the massive bullets chewed through the bow of the starboard flatboat like a monstrous invisible buzz saw. The man standing with the RPG vanished in a puree of blenderized blood, flesh and bone, the rocket in his now nonexistent hands firing wildly, leaving a smoking trail into the jungle, where it exploded in a furious geyser of plant growth and rich, dark soil.

With his thumbs still on the trigger Holliday put forty rounds along the length of the flatboat, killing the man in the middle seat. The third man flung himself overboard an instant before the last of the rounds hit the gas tank and blew the remains of the boat into splinters. The man who’d jumped overboard swam quickly toward shore doing a frantic Australian crawl to get out of the line of fire. Unfortunately the flatboat’s engine, an old, hundred-and- twenty-pound Shovelhead Harley engine, as well as the twelve-foot driveshaft and the still-whirring prop, fell out of the fireball and the mushrooming cloud of black smoke, striking the base of the swimmer’s back. His spine was shattered and he drowned simultaneously.

“Cono!” Arango said, staring. “You shoot pretty good for a yuma.”

Holliday took his thumbs off the trigger, and the chattering death from the ancient machine gun stopped. The second flatboat had turned away long before and was hiding somewhere in the heavy screening foliage that overhung both banks of the river. Holliday released the grips of the machine gun and checked the belt. There was still more than half of it left.

“You have more ammunition belts?”

“Si.” Arango nodded, still staring at the remains of the flatboat as they swirled downriver in the current. “Six or seven.”

“You’d better bring them up here,” suggested Holliday. “Those guys will be back.”

“Bastardos,” said Arango. He took the fuming cigar stub out of his mouth and spit a throatful of tobacco-colored phlegm over the side.

“I’m afraid we might have gotten ourselves in over our heads,” said Will Black as they left Joseph Patchin’s seventh-floor office. “I’m not sure where we should start.”

“That’s where I come in,” said Carrie. “Remember I said it was like looking for clues in a crossword puzzle? Well, I think I just remembered one.”

“What is it?” Black asked. They pushed the elevator button, and the doors slid open.

“It’s not what—it’s where,” said Carrie as they stepped into the elevator.

“All right, I’ll play along,” said Black. “Where?”

“Just down the road in Fairfax County,” she answered. “Fort Belvoir, to be precise.”

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s main mission is collecting, analyzing and distributing visual