The Last Templar

  Not only that, but he took nothing else. It was all he wanted.

  She thought about Amelia Gaines, the woman who looked more like someone out of a shampoo commercial than an agent of the FBI. Tess was pretty certain that the investigators wanted facts, not speculation, but even so, after a quick moment’s thought, she went into her bedroom, found the evening bag she’d carried last night, and pulled out the card given to her by Gaines.

  She placed the card on her desk and flashed back to the moment the fourth horseman had picked up the encoder. The way that he had picked it up, held it, and whispered something to it.

  He had seemed almost…reverent.

  What was it he had said? Tess had been too distraught at the Met to make a big deal out of it, but all of a sudden it was all she could think of. She focused on that moment, pushing everything else out of her consciousness, reliving the scene with the horseman lifting the encoder. And saying…what? Think, damn it.

  Like she had told Amelia Gaines, she was pretty sure the first word was veritas…but then what? Veritas? Veritas something…

  Veritas vos? Somehow, that seemed vaguely familiar. She trawled her memory for the words, but it was no use. The horseman’s words had been cut off by the gunfire that erupted behind him.

  Tess decided she would have to go with what she had. She turned to her computer and selected the most powerful metasearch engine from her links toolbar. She entered “Veritas vos” and got over twenty-two thousand hits. Not that it really mattered. The very first one was enough.

  There it was. Calling out to her.

  “Veritas vos liberabit.”

  The truth will set you free.

  She stared at it. The truth will set you free.

  Great.

  Her masterful detective work had uncovered one of the most trite and overused sound bites of our time.

  Chapter 9

  Gus Waldron emerged from the West Twenty-third Street station and headed south.

  He hated this part of town. He wasn’t a big fan of gentrification. Far from it. On his own turf, the fact that he was the size of a small building kept him safe. Here, his size only made him stand out among the fancy pissants scurrying along the sidewalks in their designer outfits and two-hundred-dollar haircuts.

  Hunching his shoulders, he knocked a few inches off his height. Even then, big as he was, it didn’t help much and neither did the long, black, shapeless coat he wore. But he could do nothing about that; he needed the coat to conceal what he was carrying.

  He turned up Twenty-second Street, heading west. His destination was a block away from the Empire Diner, located in the center of a small row of art galleries.

  As he walked past, he noted that most of the galleries had just one or maybe two pictures in their windows. Some of the pictures didn’t even have frames for chrissakes, and none that he could see had a price tag.

  How were you supposed to know if it was any fucking good if you didn’t know what it fucking cost?

  His destination was now two doors away. To outward appearances, Lucien Boussard’s place looked like a slick upmarket antiques gallery. In fact, it was that and a whole lot more. Fakes and pieces of dubious origin infected the few genuine, unsullied objects. Not that any of his neighbors suspected as much, for Lucien had the style, the accent, and the manners to fit in seamlessly.

  Very cautious now, eyes alert for anything or anyone that didn’t look right, Gus walked past the gallery, counted off twenty-five paces, then stopped and turned around. He made as if to cross the street, still couldn’t see anything that seemed out of place, and went back and was inside the gallery, his movements quick and light for a man his size. And why shouldn’t they be? In thirty fights, he had never once been hit hard enough to go down. Except when he was supposed to.

  Inside the gallery, he kept one hand in his pocket, wrapped around the butt of a Beretta 92FS. It wasn’t his handgun of choice, but he’d had a couple of misfires with the .45 ACP, and, after the big night, it wasn’t smart to carry the Cobray. He took a quick look around. No tourists, or any other customers for that matter. Just the gallery’s owner.

  Gus didn’t like many people, but, even if he had, he would not have liked Lucien Boussard. He was a smarmy little shit. Narrow face and shoulders to match, he wore his long hair pulled back into a ponytail.

  Fucking French fag.

  As Gus came in, Lucien looked up from behind a small spindly legged table where he sat working and faked an elated smile, a feeble attempt to hide the fact that he had instantly started sweating and twitching. That was possibly the one thing that Gus did like about Lucien. He was always on edge, as if he thought Gus might at any moment decide to harm him. The greasy little fuck was right about that.

  “Gus!” It came out like “Gueusse,” which only made him hate Lucien even more, every damn time he heard it.

  Turning his back to him, Gus set the lock on the door, then walked over to the table. “Anyone out back?” he grunted.

  Lucien shook his head rapidly from side to side. “Mais non, mais non, voyons, there is no one here but me.” He also had an annoying habit of repeating his faggoty French expressions several times. Maybe they all did that.

  “I wasn’t expecting you, you didn’t say—”

  “Shut the fuck up,” Gus spat back. “I’ve got something for you.” He grinned. “Something special.”

  From beneath his coat, Gus pulled out a paper bag and laid it on the table. He glanced back at the door to make sure they were out of any passerby’s sight line and took something out of the bag. It was wrapped in newspaper. He started to unwrap it, looking up at Lucien as he did.

  Lucien’s mouth opened and his eyes suddenly flared wider as Gus finally brought out the object. It was an elaborate, jewel-encrusted gold cross, around a foot and a half long, breathtaking in its detail.

  Gus set it down onto the open newspaper. He heard the hiss as Lucien sucked in his breath.

  “Mon dieu, mon dieu.” The Frenchman dragged his eyes up to Gus’s and all at once the sweat was popping across his narrow forehead. “Jesus, Gus.”

  Well, he had that right.

  He looked down again and, following his example, Gus looked and saw that the newspaper was open at a photo spread of the museum.

  “This is from the…”

  “Yeah,” Gus smirked. “It’s something, isn’t it? One of a kind.”

  Lucien’s mouth was twitching. “Non mais, il est complètement taré, ce mec. Come on, Gus, I can’t touch this.”

  It wasn’t as if Gus wanted Lucien to touch it, he just needed him to sell it. And he couldn’t exactly wait for a bidding war either. For the past six months, Gus had had a seriously bad run at the track. He had been in the hole before, but never like this, and he had never before been in the hole to the people who were now holding his markers. Throughout pretty much all of his life, since the day he grew taller and heavier than his old man and had beaten the crap out of the drunken bully, people had been afraid of Gus. But right now, for the first time since he was fourteen years old, he knew what it meant to be afraid. The men who held the markers for his gambling debts were in a different league from anyone else he had ever known. They would kill him as readily and as easily as he would step on a roach.

  Ironically, the track had also provided him with a way out. It was how he’d met the guy who got him in on the museum job. And now here he was, even though he’d been given clear instructions not to attempt to sell any of his hoard for at least six months.

  The hell with that. He needed money and he needed it now.

  “Look, don’t worry about where it’s from, all right,” Gus ordered Lucien. “You just work out where it’s going and for how much.”

  Lucien looked like he was about to have a seizure. “Non mais…listen to me, Gueusse, this is not possible. It’s not possible at all. It’s too hot to touch right now, it would be crazy to—”

  Gus seized Lucien around the throat and dragged him halfway across th
e table, which rocked precariously. He thrust his face within an inch of Lucien’s. “I don’t care if it’s thermo-fucking-nuclear,” he hissed. “People collect this shit and you know where to find them.”

  “It’s too soon,” Lucien’s voice squeaked from the pressure around his throat.

  Gus let go and the Frenchman dropped back into his seat. “Don’t talk to me like I’m some kind of retard,” he barked. “It’s always gonna be too soon for this shit, there’s never gonna be a right time. So it might as well be now. Besides, you know there’s people who’ll buy this because of what it is and where it came from. Sick fucks who’ll pay a small fortune to be able to jerk off at the idea of having it locked up in their safe. All you have to do is find me one of them and find him fast. And don’t even think of trying to dick me on the price. You get ten percent, and ten percent of priceless is nothing to piss on, is it?”

  Lucien swallowed, rubbing his neck, then pulled out a taupe silk handkerchief and wiped his face. His eyes darted around the room nervously, his mind clearly taking another tack now. He looked up at Gus and said, “Twenty.”

  Gus looked at him, bemused. “Lucien,”—he always said it like “loo-shin,” just to annoy him—“you’re not growing balls on me all of a sudden now, are you?”

  “I am serious. For something like this, it has to be twenty percent. Au moins. I will be taking a big risk on this.”

  Gus reached out again but this time Lucien was too fast, sliding his chair back so that his neck was out of reach. Instead, Gus calmly took out the Beretta and moved closer, jamming it into Lucien’s crotch. “I don’t know what you’ve been snorting, but I’m not really in a negotiating mood here, princess. I’ve made you a generous offer and all you do is try and take advantage of the situation. I’m disappointed, man.”

  “No, look, Gus…”

  Gus raised his hand and shrugged. “I don’t know if you caught the best part on TV that night. Outside. With the guard. It was something. And I’ve still got the blade, you know, and, let me tell ya, I’m kinda getting into that whole Conan shit, you know what I’m saying?”

  For a moment, while he let Lucien sweat it, Gus was thinking hard. He knew that, if he had all the time in the world, Lucien’s fear of him would work in his favor. But he didn’t have all the time in the world. The cross was worth a small fortune, maybe even seven figures, but right now he would take what he could get and be happy about it. The up-front cash he had made by signing on for the museum raid had bought him time; now he needed to get those leeches off his back.

  “I’ll tell you what,” he told Lucien. “Make this worth my while, and I’ll go to fifteen.”

  He saw a flicker in Lucien’s weasel eyes. He was hooked.

  Lucien opened a drawer and pulled out a small digital camera. He looked up at Gus.

  “I need to—”

  Gus nodded. “Knock yourself out.”

  Lucien took a couple of pictures of the cross, clearly doing a mental run through his client list already.

  “I’ll make some calls,” Lucien said. “Give me a few days.”

  No good. Gus needed the money and the freedom it would give him. He also needed to get out of town for a while until the dust settled around the museum job. All of these things he needed now.

  “Uh-uh. It’s got to be quick. A couple of days, max.”

  Once again, he could see something working away behind Lucien’s eyes. Probably trying to figure how he could work a deal with a buyer, a fat fee for promising to barter the seller down, even though the seller had already agreed. The slimy little shit. Gus decided that a few months from now, when the time was right, he would really enjoy paying Lucien another visit.

  “Come back at six, tomorrow,” Lucien said. “No promises, but I’ll do my best.”

  “I know you will.” Gus picked up the cross, grabbed a cleaning rag that was lying on Lucien’s desk, and wrapped it around the jeweled relic before tucking it into one of the inside pockets of his coat. He then put the gun into another. “Tomorrow,” he said to Lucien, and grinned humorlessly before he went out into the street.

  Lucien was still shaking as he watched the big man walk all the way to the corner and disappear from sight.

  Chapter 10

  “You know, I could’ve done without this right now,” Jansson growled as Reilly dropped into a chair across from his boss. Already seated at the table in the assistant director in charge’s office at Federal Plaza were Aparo and Amelia Gaines as well as Roger Blackburn, who ran the violent crimes/major offenders task force, and two of Blackburn’s assistant special agents in charge.

  The complex of four government buildings in lower Manhattan was just a few blocks away from Ground Zero. It housed twenty-five thousand government employees, and was also home to the New York field office of the FBI. Sitting there, Reilly was relieved to be away from the incessant noise in the main work area. In fact, the comparative tranquillity of his boss’s private office was just about the only thing about Jansson’s job that was even remotely tempting.

  As ADIC of the New York field office, Jansson had been shouldering a huge burden over the last few years. All five areas of major concern to the Bureau—drugs and organized crime, violent crime and major offenders, financial crime, foreign counterintelligence, and, the latest black sheep of that odious herd, domestic terrorism—were firing on all cylinders. Jansson certainly seemed built for the task: the man had the imposing bulk of the former football player he was; although beneath his gray hair, his solid face had a detached, distant expression. This didn’t throw the people working under him for long, as they quickly learned that one thing, beyond the proverbial death and taxes, was certain: if Jansson was on your side, you could count on him to bulldoze anything that came in your path. If, however, you made the mistake of crossing him, leaving the country was definitely worth considering.

  With Jansson being so close to retirement, Reilly could understand why his boss didn’t particularly appreciate having his last few months in office complicated by something as high profile as METRAID—the robbery’s imaginative new case name. The media had, quite rightly, pounced on the story. This wasn’t a routine armed robbery. It was a full-blown raid. Automatic machine-gun fire had raked New York’s A-list. The mayor’s wife was taken hostage. A man was executed in plain sight; not just shot, but beheaded, and not in a walled courtyard in some Middle Eastern dictatorship, but here, in Manhattan, on Fifth Avenue.

  On live television.

  Reilly looked from Jansson to the flag and the Bureau insignia on the wall behind him, then back again as the ADIC rested his elbows on his desk and sucked in a barrelful of air.

  “I’ll make sure I tell those bastards how inconsiderate they’ve been when we book ’em,” Reilly offered.

  “You do that,” Jansson said as he leaned forward, his intense glare sweeping across the faces of his assembled team. “I don’t need to tell you the amount of calls I’ve gotten on this or from how high up they’ve come. Tell me where we are and where we’re going with it.”

  Reilly glanced at the others and took the lead.

  “Preliminary forensics don’t point us in any particular direction. Those guys didn’t leave much behind besides shell casings and the horses. The ERT guys are pulling their hair out at having so little to go on.”

  “For once,” Aparo chimed in.

  “Anyway, the casings tell us they were packing M11/9 Cobrays and Micro Uzis. Rog, you guys are looking into that, right?”

  Blackburn cleared his throat. He was a force of nature who had recently pulled off the dismantling of the biggest heroin distribution network in Harlem, resulting in over two hundred arrests. “Garden variety, obviously. We’re going through the motions, but I wouldn’t hold my breath. Not on something like this. Can’t imagine these boys just bought them off the Web.”

  Jansson nodded. “What about the horses?”

  Reilly picked up. “So far, nothing. Gray and chestnut geldings, pretty common. We’r
e cross-checking them against records of missing horses and chasing down the saddles’ points of origin, but again…”

  “No brands or microchips?”

  With over fifty thousand horses stolen each year across the country, the use of identification marks on horses was becoming more and more prevalent. The most popular method was freeze branding, which involved the use of a super-cold branding iron to alter the color-pigment-producing cells, resulting in white hair growing at the brand site, instead of colored hair. The other, less common method involved using a hypodermic needle to inject a tiny microchip with an identification number programmed into it under the skin of the animal.

  “No chips,” Reilly replied, “but we’re having them scanned again. The chips are so tiny that unless you know exactly where they are, it’s not an easy find. Added to the fact that they’re usually hidden in less obvious areas to make sure they’re still there, if and when a stolen horse is recovered. On the plus side, they did have freeze brands, but they’ve been branded over and are now unreadable. The lab boys think they may be able to get something by separating the different passes to bring up the original mark.”

  “What about the outfits and the medieval hardware?” Jansson turned to Amelia Gaines, who had been following up that line of investigation.

  “That’s going to take more time,” she said. “The typical sources for that type of kit are small specialists scattered across the country, especially when it comes to broadswords that are the real thing, not just party props. I think we’ll get something here.”

  “So these guys just disappeared into thin air, is that it?” Jansson was clearly losing patience.

  “They must have had cars waiting. There are two exits out of the park not far from where they dumped the horses. We’re canvassing for witnesses, but so far, nothing,” Aparo confirmed. “Four guys, splitting up, walking out of the park, that time of the evening. It’s easy to go unnoticed.”

  Jansson sat back, nodding quietly, his mind collating the disparate chunks of information and ordering his thoughts. “Who do we like for this? Anyone have a favorite yet?”