26
He knew very little. Wherever he was, it was windowless, utterly dark and concrete. He knew it was concrete because he could feel its surface under his hands. By his count it was twenty paces long and twelve paces wide. With his arms outstretched he couldn't touch the ceiling, which meant it was taller than eight feet. In the center of the unreachable ceiling was a blower vent that cycled off and on regularly. The air was cool, maybe a little less than seventy degrees. Chilly but bearable. There was a single door, a slab of metal with a felt strip glued to the foot to blot out any ambient light, with hinges on the outside. There was a metal, lidless, tankless toilet and a sink built into the end wall. He was in a large, purpose-built holding cell.
He knew a few other things. There was a vague but clear scent of aviation fuel blown in through the vent system, which meant his jail bunker was part of or very close to an airport facility of some kind. They'd taken his clothes and he seemed to be dressed in some oversized boiler suit and rubber thongs. Prison garb. By his own estimation he'd been under for close to forty-eight hours, but it could have been longer. He had no recollection of anything after the powerful jolt of electricity he'd received.
He didn't actually know but he was pretty sure what happened after that. The diplomatic term the State Department used these days was "extraordinary rendition" and it had been around since Reagan's day. The simple term was "kidnapping." Take a subject off his home turf and do whatever you wanted to him in places just like this: black sites. Another euphemism, for "torture chamber."
He knew he could be almost anywhere. The CIA and the Joint Chiefs maintained black sites in almost every country in Europe and in a dozen or more sympathetic countries around the world. They used everything from Gulfstream Vs to Lears and even a couple of Boeing "Biz" Jets wearing phony tail numbers and registrations.
The whole system had a whiff of Nazism to it and from the first time he'd encountered it back in Afghanistan it had offended Holliday's sense of military honor. You fought wars out in the open, not by skulking under rotting logs and damp stones. The CIA for its part was supposed to gather intelligence, not act like a modern-day version of the Spanish Inquisition.
Suddenly a wire-covered fluorescent fixture in the ceiling flickered to life, buzzing and clicking for a few seconds before giving out a steady light. Holliday blinked and covered his eyes in the sudden glare. A moment after the light came on the metal door opened and three men appeared dressed in generic BDUs that didn't look like any American camouflage pattern he'd ever seen. The caps were a little odd, too-the bills were quilted and they had fold-up earflaps. The design was clearly Eastern European-Russian, Czech or Bulgarian. He was somewhere behind what used to be called the Iron Curtain.
The first two men were carrying a small metal table. The third man carried a pair of metal straight chairs. They set them down in the center of the room directly under the light fixture.
"Holloa." Nothing. Not Bulgarian.
"Csak keveset beszelek magyaru." No response. Not Hungarian.
"WyliA? mi dupe, matkojebca." Definitely not Polish.
"Dobra Den. Do prdele." A slightly turned head and a small look of surprise on one of the men carrying the table.
Gotcha, thought Holliday. They were Czech. The last time he'd been in the Czech Republic had been more than a year ago with the Sinclair girl on a wild-goose chase that had almost killed him.
The three men left the room. They also left the door open. Holliday didn't move from his position on the floor. A reed-thin figure, cigarette in hand, appeared in the doorway.
"Mrs. Sinclair," said Holliday as Kate Sinclair walked into the dungeonlike room. The tip of her cigarette glowed. She was wearing a very expensive Chanel pin-striped power suit.
"So nice to be remembered." The elderly woman smiled.
"You must be very pleased," said Holliday. "A heartbeat away from the White House. Too bad he didn't earn the position on merit."
"We're not here to talk about my son, Colonel. We're here to talk about you and something that rightfully belongs in our family."
"How did you find us so quickly?" Holliday asked, avoiding the subject of Brother Rodrigues's notebook.
"We've had you watched for weeks." She paused, blew smoke and inhaled again. "Now, let us get down to business."
"This is the second time I've been kidnapped by your little group," said Holliday, stalling. The Sinclair matriarch sighed.
"I'd hardly call it a 'little' group," she answered. "The membership of Rex Deus is considerably larger than you might think. We have a great many members in high places."
"People who can make other people disappear? People who can fake assassination attempts?"
"You mean my son?" Sinclair shook her head. "That was easy in comparison to killing the Pope."
"If you were setting me up as some kind of patsy, why make me vanish now?" Holliday asked. "I should be brought down in a hail of bullets somewhere, with the media invited to the finale."
"All in good time, Colonel. We all have our parts to play in our little production." She dropped the short end of her cigarette onto the concrete floor and ground it under her heel. "The notebook," she said. "The Templar notebook. My notebook."
"It's not yours, and you know I'm not going to tell you anything about it."
"Of course you will," said the old woman. "Eventually. We have leverage, you see. Your cousin."
"What have you done with Peggy?"
"Don't worry, Colonel. She's as much a part of the story as you are. You'll be reunited later, I assure you."
"Your assurances don't impress me much, Mrs. Sinclair. You and Matoon and the rest of your crazy friends are all traitors."
"Patriots," answered Sinclair.
"Crap," snorted Holliday.
"We're taking this country back, Colonel Holliday."
"Back from who, exactly?"
"Back from the mongrel hordes that have been bringing our nation to its knees without us even knowing about it, much less caring. It's bread and circuses. People are watching reality shows about stupid women having eight or ten children at a time, parents are putting their children in balloons for publicity and meanwhile the country's going to hell. They watch pansy movies about trees that are alive or trees that can walk and talk. Half the country is Mexican, Jew or Arab. Our borders are leaking blood in one direction and drugs and illegal immigrants in the other, our money's been devalued and our foreign policy is all about appeasement. No one even speaks English anymore!"
Holliday saw something in her eyes then and he suddenly knew there was no point in trying to have a rational discussion or argument with this woman. Whether borne out of too much power or from something carried in the blood, Kate Sinclair was utterly and irrevocably mad, as mad as any fundamentalist Muslim putting out a fatwa on a cartoon show, as paranoid as Richard Nixon had been at his worst moments, as crazy as a loon.
"You're insane," he said quietly. "And you're an accessory to murder. You're no better than Charlie Manson."
"I am the avatar of destiny," said the Sinclair woman ponderously. "And history will absolve me."
Fidel Castro's final remark in his own defense at his first trial, and a sentiment expressed by Hitler, Stalin and Rasputin. Good company. All dictators, all with God complexes and all utterly insane.
"So what's the plan?" Holliday sighed.
"I intend to recover my birthright from you. To that end we are moving you to Pankrac Prison immediately." Sinclair smiled blandly and lit another cigarette. "You've heard of it?"
"A nineteenth-century hellhole on the outskirts of Prague," said Holliday. "The Nazis used it and later on it was a KGB interrogation center."
"It's now owned by Blackhawk Security."
"You, in other words," said Holliday. He smiled wanly. "Presumably I can expect a little in the way of advanced interrogation techniques-a little waterboarding, maybe?"