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.”
“Qué?” 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
JOHN LEESON
SENIOR STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER
He made another set identifying Eddie as his assistant and printed those out, as well. Considering the fact that Havana was a Unesco World Heritage city, it made sense that they would send a photographer assistant around every few years to document and project on the restoration of historic buildings in the city, and all the camera equipment in the suitcase would easily disguise the added eleven pounds of weight.
“That’s about it,” Holliday said. “Tomorrow we buy some clothes and a few guidebooks in the morning, have our meeting down the street in the afternoon and the next day we fly to Cuba.”
“And pray that everything goes as we have planned when we get there,” added Eddie.
Dr. Steven Braintree’s office at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Medieval Studies was located on the third floor of a large, stodgy-looking neo-Georgian building kitty-corner to the hotel on the southern side of Bloor Street. The office was pretty much the way Holliday had remembered: piles of papers on piles of file folders on piles of books with a few overflowing filing cabinets and more files, papers and books piled on his wide windowsill. Braintree hadn’t changed much, either; there were a few flecks of gray in his long dark hair now, but the trendy Prada glasses, the sneakers and the jeans were just the same. This time the message on his black T-shirt said FREE GIGI’S! PIZZA GIGI’S, BEST PIZZA IN TORONTO—PICKY POTHEADS PICK PIZZA GIGI’S.
Holliday made the introductions and they sat down in what little space was left. “Been a while, Colonel. I was a little surprised to hear from you,” said Braintree. Holliday had been following clues to the origins of the Templar sword he’d found hidden in his uncle Henry’s house, and Braintree had been on the list. “You ever find what you were looking for?” asked the history professor.
“Too much, when you get right down to it,” Holliday replied. It had never occurred to him that there would be a litter of bodies left behind him on his search or that the monk Helder Rodrigues would pass along the best-kept secret in seven hundred years before dying in his arms.
“So, what can I do for you now?” Braintree asked.
“Tell me everything you know about the Templars in Cuba.”
Braintree glanced at Eddie. “Te Cubana?”
“Sí, Doctore.” Eddie nodded.
“Miami?”