“Go! Now!” Holliday yelled. The first ranging burst from the truck was chewing up the dirt runway a few yards ahead. Eddie released the yoke and pulled the throttle all the way back. The Antonov jumped forward like an overweight greyhound chasing a rabbit. Holliday and Eddie were thrown back into their seats as the first burst of machine-gun bullets struck the plane, clipping the undercarriage and the belly of the fuselage only seconds before the Antonov took to the air. A second burst hammered through the lower starboard-side wing, but by then it was too late-the Antonov was climbing at an insane rate of speed, all with Eddie’s hands clear of the yoke. He worked the pedals and the plane banked away from the airstrip and the murderous fire of the machine gun. Only then did Eddie grab the yoke and gently ease the old airplane into level flight. The Volga was five hundred feet below them and the machine-gunning Gaz was a memory.
“You always fly with no hands?” Holliday asked.
“You do not lead una vaca by her horns, amigo; you let her find her own way. It is the same with this aircraft.” He stroked the yoke in front of his hands. “When you taxi the Antonov the yoke is the brake. Pull the yoke to raise the nose and you will stand the aircraft on its head.”
“Glad I wasn’t trying to fly it.” Holliday laughed.
“Yo tambien, compadre-me, too.” Eddie grinned. He reached into the side pocket on his left and pulled out the bulging chart book. Flying the plane with his knees, he leafed through the charts until he found the one he wanted. He studied it for a moment, then stuffed the chart book back into the side pocket. He adjusted the Antonov’s course slightly and they slowly lost altitude until they were only three hundred feet or so above the ground.
“How far to Yekaterinburg?” Holliday asked.
“Two hours, maybe, two and a half, no more than that.”
“Where do we land?”
“A good question, mi amigo,” answered Eddie. “A very good question.”
The International Cathar Historical Society met in the village of Montsegur each year. Montsegur was a favorite of groups interested in Cathar history, of which there were a surprising number, and the ICHS didn’t stand out among them in any special way. Each year they organized tours of the massive Cathar stronghold on the steep hill that loomed above the town, as well as seminars and readings about the twelfth- and thirteenth-century sect that split from the Catholic Church, believing it to be irretrievably corrupt.
The Cathars also believed that each man had the individual spark of God within his soul and needed no organized religion to keep that spark alive. To them Christ was a prophet and philosopher and no more divine than any other ordinary man.
Most interesting, at least to the International Cathar Historical Society, was the fact that the Cathars believed that they were the true inheritors of the Apostolic Creed, not the Roman Catholic Church. It was this connection with the Apostles that attracted the ICHS, since they were in fact known to one another as the Apostles, a group of twelve men organized secretly in the early thirteen hundreds to protect, preserve and enlarge the assets of the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon, more commonly referred to as the Templars.
The Apostles had never been knights of the order, but they had been and continued to be its bankers, its accountants and its bookkeepers. With their ink-stained fingers the monks and laymen of the order had survived long past the vaunted holy men, the knights and the grand masters, most of whom were tortured or burned at the stake, or both. The scribes, the note takers, the money changers and the moneylenders had gone on undisturbed and tranquil in the immutability of numbers, of money owed and money lent.
The motto of the Templar Knights had been, In hoc signo vinces-By this sign we shall conquer. The motto of the Apostles was, Aqua profunda est quieta-Still waters run deep. Better to survive shyly for your purpose than to die any number of glorious and useless deaths.
The twelve Apostles-and there were always twelve who came to Montsegur each year-were from every inhabitable continent, and in their way represented every major power on the planet. None of the twelve ever answered to their real names when they met, although some knew of one another and did business together. When they met they were Peter, Andrew, James, John, Philip, Bartholomew, Matthew, Thomas, James, son of Alphaeus, Thaddeus, Simon and Judas Iscariot. In this way, as Apostles died and were replaced, continuity, which was their watchword, never changed-always twelve, always the same.
As always when the Apostles assembled together they spoke in Berrichon, the obscure and now vanished vulgate Latin tongue that the Templars had sometimes used in coded communications with one another.
Pierre Ducos was Peter, not the first Apostle but, as the Greek version of his name suggested, the Apostles’ “rock.” Usually it was Ducos who offered the official greeting and prayer as the twelve men gathered in the private dining room of the Hotel Costes. The sumptuous meal had been laid before them, the wine poured, and the waitstaff had withdrawn. It was a prayer little known and even more rarely heard.
“May the grace of the Holy Spirit be present with us. May Mary, Star of the Sea, lead us to the harbor of salvation. Amen.
“Holy Father, eternal God, omnipotent, omniscient creator, bestower, kind ruler and most tender lover, pious and humble redeemer; gentle, merciful savior, Lord! I humbly beseech Thee and implore Thee that Thou may enlighten me, free me and preserve the brothers of the Temple and all Thy Christian people, troubled as they are.
“Thou, O God, who knowest that we are innocent, set us free that we may keep our vows and Your commandments in humility, and serve Thee and act according to Thy will. Dispel all those unjust reproaches, far from the truth, heaped upon us by the means of tough adversities, great tribulations and temptations, which we have endured, but can endure no longer. Amen.”
There was a chorus of mumbled amens and then the clatter of cutlery. Sir James Sinclair, otherwise known as Simon to the group, was the first to speak. “In our discussions over the last few weeks most of us have voiced concerns regarding the man Holliday. Rodrigues had no right to give the list to him.”
“Rodrigues was dying, as I recall,” answered Ducos. He took a sip of his wine, a very fine Margaux. “And in point of fact, Holliday’s uncle was one of us many years ago. He has some right to the notebook.”
“He was never pledged to the order,” said Judas, a plump banker from Switzerland. “He has no idea of the laws and ordinances. He is not one of us; therefore he has no rights at all.”
“From what we’ve seen he wouldn’t have abided by the laws and ordinances anyway,” snapped Sir James Sinclair. “He is a rogue and he cannot be tolerated.”
“Enjoy your ratatouille before it gets cold, my dear Simon; there is nothing worse than soggy vegetables,” said Ducos. “The situation is in hand. The Russian has promised me that when Holliday reaches the church in Yekaterinburg, he will be dealt with.”
“And if he doesn’t go to the church?” Sir James asked, taking of a forkful of the aromatic vegetable stew.
“If he does not go to the church, my dear Simon, then we have nothing to worry about, n’est-ce pas?” The lawyer smiled, watching as the Scotsman’s protests were silenced by the marvelously cooked meal. “We have been one step ahead of the unfortunate colonel and his golliwog friend from the very beginning.”
25
Landing near Yekaterinburg presented no real problems, to Holliday’s surprise. With the main airport out of the question when flying a stolen plane, Eddie artfully set the old Antonov down in a farmer’s fallow field. Safely back on the ground, the two men found an old set of abandoned railway tracks leading into the town of Sredneuralsk less than a mile from their landing spot. Both men carried the backpacks they’d taken from the train, and Holliday still carried the Serdyukov SPS automatic he’d taken from the provodnitsa. According to the charts, Sredneuralsk was about twenty-five miles from Yekaterinburg.