Valley of the Templars

“How long before your friend shows up?”

Hartog suddenly pulled out a desk drawer in the table and reached inside. Eddie took one step forward, grabbed the ten-foot-long oak table and overturned it, dumping Hartog off his stool. Holliday stepped over the table, bent down and picked up a compact little automatic pistol off the floor. A Walther PPK, the James Bond gun. He pointed it at Hartog. “The passports and the pictures.”

“In the drawer,” replied the Dutchman. Eddie checked the drawer and came up with the documents.

“Who were you talking to?” Holliday asked, pointing the gun roughly at the center of Hartog’s face, now devoid of its Richard Nixon mask.

“A lawyer.”

“What’s his name?”

“Derlagen.”

“Why?”

“He has contacts.”

“Who is he sending?”

“Some people.”

“How many?”

“Two, three, I don’t know.”

“They’re coming to kill us?”

“Yes.”

“Once upon a time it wouldn’t have occurred to me to do this,” said Holliday. “But people change.” He squeezed the trigger on the Walther and put a bullet into Hartog’s head just above the bridge of his nose.

He looked around the room, found a gallon tin of acetone for cleaning the press and spread it over everything, including Hartog. He dribbled a train of acetone to the bottom of the stairs and then used the lighter to start the fire.

“Come on,” said Holliday. “We better get out of here before the bad guys arrive.” He stood for a moment at the foot of the stairs, watching the fire gain strength; then he followed Eddie back to the main floor.

By the time they reached the store itself, Holliday realized they were too late. Someone was rattling at the door. There was a quick, brittle sound of glass breaking and then the door was unlatched. Holliday motioned Eddie to the left as the two men slipped in between the hanging racks of costumes.

Holliday could already smell the smoke from the fire downstairs, and it wouldn’t be long before the whole store was consumed. As the two men approached, he tensed, waiting for the right moment. He had the flat little Walther, but small caliber or not, it still made a lot of noise.

When it came, it came without thinking for both men. As his man passed him by, Eddie stepped out into the aisle, grabbed the man’s right wrist and bent it back toward his shoulder blades, forcing him to drop his weapon, a large-caliber automatic with a suppressor on it. That accomplished, the Cuban kicked the man’s legs out from under him, put a knee in his spine and wrapped an arm around his head, pulling sharply until he heard the bone at the base of the intruder’s skull snap.

Holliday’s man wasn’t much different. Holliday used the butt of the Walther to punch him in the throat, swept his legs out from under him and broke his neck. The smell of smoke was very strong now, and Holliday could see flames behind the glass in the office window. He flipped his man over and checked in his pockets.

“Shit.”

“Que?” Eddie asked.

“They’re company men. CIA Philpott’s put a hit out on us.”

“A hit?” Eddie asked. “Como un golpe en la cabeza? No lo entiendo.”

“A kill order. We’ve got to get out of Amsterdam, fast.”

3

They took the six fifty a.m. KLM flight the following day and arrived in Toronto in the late afternoon. Holliday used his new passport and driver’s license to open up an account at the Royal Bank of Canada Airport branch; then he and Eddie took a town car into the city. They booked into the Park Hyatt at Avenue Road and Bloor Street, which was kitty-corner to the University of Toronto’s Centre for Medieval Studies, had a room service steak and then Eddie bailed out and was asleep on the couch within five minutes. Holliday gathered up his key card and went down to the business center.

Using the account codes he’d long ago learned from the notebook the monk Helder Rodrigues had given him, Holliday transferred one hundred and fifty thousand dollars in U.S funds from the Royal Bank of Canada’s main branch in Nassau in the Bahamas to his newly opened account in Toronto. He booked off the hotel computer, the online fees charged directly to the suite, then went back upstairs, had a quick shot of Scotch from the minibar, listening to Eddie snoring on the couch while he looked out at the lights of the city, then went to bed himself, giving in to the fatigue he’d endured in Ramstein’s hospital and his much more recent jet lag. He was asleep within a minute of his head hitting the pillows.

The next morning he and Eddie went to the hotel concierge, asked a number of questions and got satisfactory answers. Their first chore was a taxi ride to a store called Save More Surplus on the western edge of a public housing project ten or eleven blocks from the flying saucer shape of Toronto City Hall. Eddie bought a battered knapsack with a faded Canadian flag sewed onto the flap, and Holliday bought two black Samsonite F’lite hard-shell suitcases. They then had the taxi do a U-turn and take them west along Queen Street until they reached a store called Henry’s Photo. While the taxi waited Holliday went into the big store, bought a Nikon D2X camera body and every lens and accessory that was available as well as a large block of cutout hard foam to protect it all.

They dropped their purchases off at the hotel, then took a second taxi to the local Walmart, where they bought a commercial-grade Weston Vacuum Sealer with an eighteen-inch seal, a box of one hundred large bags, two bottles of Krazy Glue and a black yoga mat.

They took the sealer and their other purchases back to the hotel, where Holliday dropped off Eddie and continued on to Royal Bank Plaza at the foot of Yonge Street, Toronto’s version of Broadway. The main branch of the bank was housed in a somewhat ostentatious skyscraper with gold-tinted faceted windows. Banks, never really liking the idea of people withdrawing money, balked slightly at Holliday requesting a hundred thousand dollars in American twenties, but eventually and after a few phone calls to the Bahamas they complied, giving him the money in a white cardboard box with a discreet lion rampant logo in one corner. Holliday immediately took the money back to the hotel, and the real labors began.

“You really think this is going to work, mi colonel?” Eddie asked, staring at their purchases spread out across the dining table in their suite.

“If what you tell me about customs at Jose Marti Airport is right, it should work like a charm,” Holliday said, smiling at his friend.

One hundred thousand dollars in American twenty-dollar bills weighs almost exactly eleven pounds. Each bill is approximately six inches by two inches, which means that a total of twenty-seven stacks of forty-seven twenties, or one hundred thousand dollars in total, can be vacuum-sealed in a single eighteen-by-eighteen-inch bag a little less than a quarter of an inch high. With the black lining of the Samsonite carefully removed, the bag could be glued to the back of the suitcase, covered with a carefully cut piece of black foam from the yoga mat and then the black nylon lining replaced. Which is exactly what they did.

At the conceirge’s suggestion they had an excellent dinner of osso buco at a restaurant simply called Grace and returned to the hotel. Back in their suite, Holliday trimmed the camera foam to the exact dimensions of the doctored suitcase, then cutouts for the camera body, the lenses and accessories. With that complete, Holliday went down to the business center and within half an hour he had cut and pasted off the Internet to make himself fifty “engraved” business cards, using the name on his passport and driver’s license:

UNESCO WORLD HERITAGE CENTER