“Because one of their people tried to kill us in Jerusalem,” said Holliday. “A priest, like you.”
“I told you,” said Rodrigues, “I am no longer a priest.”
“That doesn’t matter. What interest does the Vatican have in all of this?”
“The same as it did eight hundred years ago,” answered Rodrigues. “Power. Or the lack of it. The Saladin treasure would make the Roman Catholic Church an irrelevancy in one blow if it was revealed. The political machinery that has evolved in the Holy See over a thousand years would come down like Humpty Dumpty off his wall. There would be no way to put it back together again.”
“I don’t get it,” said Peggy. “The Vatican has more money than it knows what to do with. You’re trying to tell me they’d hire killers just to get more?”
“You’d be surprised at what the Church is capable of,” said Rodrigues. “But this is not about money. It never was.”
“What else is treasure about?” Peggy said.
“When is a treasure not a treasure?” Rodrigues responded.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Peggy asked, exasperated by the tall man’s roundabout answers.
“I think I see,” said Holliday slowly.
“Well, I sure don’t,” said Peggy.
There was a sound from the road outside the cottage: tires on gravel, and more than one vehicle from the sounds of it. Doors slammed, and they heard the low sound of voices speaking quietly.
Rodrigues stood and went to the window. He looked for a few seconds, then turned away and went to the fireplace. He took down the shotgun, carried it to the desk, and rummaged in one of the desk drawers. He took out a handful of shells, broke the barrels of the shotgun, and loaded it. He snapped the barrels closed and turned to Holliday and Peggy.
“We have visitors,” Rodrigues said. “Unwelcome ones by my estimation.”
32
Through the window, Holliday saw two cars, an old Citroлn 2CV and an even older Mercedes sedan, standing on the gravel in front of the cottage. There were six men, all big, blond, and hard-faced. One of them stood at the trunk of the Mercedes handing out weapons to the others. Shotguns and small, brutal-looking machine pistols, Uzis and MAC-10s. Holliday caught the flash of a tattoo on the wrist of one of the men.
“Kellerman’s people,” said Holliday.
“Ordo Novi Templi,” nodded Rodrigues. “The Order of the New Templars.”
“You know about Kellerman?” Peggy asked, startled.
“There have been White Templars and Black since the beginning,” answered the ex-priest. “Ordo Novi Templi is simply one of the Black Templars’ more recent incarnations.” The tall man shook his head. “There is no time to explain further. We must leave this place immediately.”
“And how are we supposed to do that?” Holliday asked. “Those men outside aren’t about to give us a free pass.”
“Vis consili expers mole ruit sua,” said Rodrigues, stuffing the pockets of his trousers with more shotgun shells.
“Horace,” answered Holliday. “ ‘Discretion is the better part of valor.’ You don’t happen to have another weapon by any chance, do you?”
Rodrigues reached under the desk. There was a faint tearing sound: Velcro. He handed Holliday a well-oiled Czech CZ 75 automatic pistol in a belt-clip holster.
“It’s loaded with Smith and Wesson.40-caliber copkillers-Teflon coated.”
“Strange priest,” said Holliday, stuffing the holster into the waistband of his jeans.
“Strange times,” responded Rodrigues. “Follow me.”
Rodrigues stepped quickly to the center of the room and threw back the braided rug. Beneath it was the obvious square and iron ring of a trapdoor set into the floor.
Peggy groaned. “Not this again!”
Rodrigues grabbed the ring and pulled up the trapdoor. Beneath it was a narrow set of stone steps leading downward. The ex-priest motioned them toward the opening.
“Go down. I’ll come after you.”
“It’s dark,” objected Peggy.
“The fifth step down on the right,” instructed Rodrigues. “There’s a switch on the wall.”
“Go,” said Holliday to Peggy.
She eased herself onto the stairs and went downward, feeling her way with one hand against the stone. A few seconds later there was a wash of light, and Holliday heard the distant grumbling of a generator coming from far below.
“Your turn,” said Rodrigues.
“They’re going to follow us, you know,” cautioned Holliday.
“I think I can cool their ardor somewhat.” The ex-priest smiled. “Go.”
Holliday went down the steps, following Peggy. He could see her below him on the stairs carved into the ancient, porous, pumice-like stone at a steep angle. A thick old-fashioned strip of flat cable was threaded through rusty old staples in the roof of the stairway, and bare bulbs hung every ten feet or so, the light pulsing with each cycle of the generator.
The stairway turned sharply at almost right angles and suddenly ended in a low, wide tunnel that looked man-made but wasn’t. Peggy was waiting for him. The tunnel went left and right; the left-hand path was dark while the right-hand path was lit by the same bulbs as the stairway. Holliday stretched out his hand and ran his fingers along the rows of parallel ridges in the frozen stone.
“A lava tube,” he said. Once upon a time molten stone had flowed in a white-hot liquid river down this subterranean path, eventually ending in the sea. Ahead of them Holliday could hear the echoing, out-of-place sound of the generator powering the lights in the ceiling overhead.
“What do we do now?” Peggy asked, staring down the tunnel.
“Wait for Rodrigues,” answered Holliday. He drew the pistol, racked the slide, and waited at the foot of the steps. The ex-priest appeared a few moments later, his expression tense.
“I’ve been expecting something like this for many years,” said Rodrigues as he stepped into the tunnel, the shotgun cradled in his arms. “Secrets never remain secrets forever. As Shakespeare said-‘the truth will out.’ ”
From above them there was the sudden sound of an explosion. Rodrigues smiled grimly.
“That should even the odds a little,” he said. “This way.” He headed off down the tunnel. The lava tube went noticeably downward for two or three hundred yards, meandering around extruded rock formations as it found its petrified path, narrowing until it was barely wide enough to navigate. Finally it was no more than a crack in the seamed, black stone.
Peggy felt her chest constricting. Without the naked lightbulbs in the roof of the now two-foot-wide passageway, she knew she’d be having a severe case of the screaming meemies. Tight spots and stalled elevators had never been her favorites. The fact that there was probably a squad of armed goons behind them wasn’t making her feel any better.
“Getting a little claustrophobic here,” she muttered warningly to Holliday, who had taken up a position right behind her.
They were shuffling sideways now, faces inches from the rock walls.
“It’ll be over in a few seconds,” soothed Rodrigues ahead of her in the impossibly narrow corridor.
Peggy wasn’t quite sure she liked his choice of words.
Suddenly Rodrigues vanished. She heard his voice.
“Mind the step,” he said. Peggy squeezed out through the crack and stopped dead in her tracks. She felt Holliday slip out behind her onto the small stone platform.
“Holy crap,” she whispered.
“My God,” breathed Holliday, stunned by the vision that rose before him.
The scale was almost beyond belief.
They stood at the foot of a cavern almost as large as the main concourse of Grand Central Terminal in New York City. It was as wide as a football field and twice as long. The ceiling, towering more than a hundred feet overhead, seemed to pulse with life. Color, form, and texture danced up from the mists of time long past as giraffes and wildebeests wandered across endless plains; ibex, scores of them, raced in bent-legged flight, horns swept back as black stick figures pursued them over the great veldts.
Bears, not seen in the Azores since the dawn of the last ice age, roamed through ancient forests. Life-sized Phoenician triremes, sails bent above twin hulls, drove across restless seas through the Pillars of Hercules and beyond into the great unknown sea. Crusader ships followed them, white Templar crosses proud on red sails. Soldiers in armor and chain mail, thousands of them, marched forever out through Jerusalem’s gates. Red, green, black, yellow, and ochre, blues azure and aquamarine, blacks and browns and silver, flowing muscle, finely wrought bone, men, animals, creatures that were both and neither, hundreds of them, herds of them, armies and oceans of them, all danced, sailed, rode, and ran across time and the arching ceiling overhead in a strange fantastic vision on the stone.