Read Online Valley of the Templars by Paul Christopher - Free Book Online

rather good.”
    “The phone call?”
    “Right. It was from someone named Dr. Eugenio Selman-Housein Sosa. He’s staying at the Shelbourne. He wants to defect, of all things. I didn’t think anyone did that sort of thing anymore. Cold War stuff, you know?”
    “Who on earth is Dr. Eugenio Selman et cetera, et cetera?”
    “He’s Fidel Castro’s personal physician.”
    “Bloody hell!” Anabel frowned. “What’s he doing in Dublin?”
    “He’s a cardiologist. There’s a big convention at Trinity this week.”
    “And he wants to defect?”
    “That’s what he said.”
    “Tell him to get into a cab, then.”
    “He’s being watched, or so he says.”
    “Do you believe him?”
    “It’s possible. The Cuban DGI has a very long arm and he’s a VIP.”
    “You can’t authorize this on your own.”
    “I know. He’s only here until Friday. That’s three days. I’ll have to get on my trolley and visit Babylon tonight.”
    “Good luck, mate.” Anabel grinned.
    “I should be able to catch the diplomatic flight. No sense in traveling with the great unwashed on Ryanair or something equally disgusting.”
    “No sense at all,” said Anabel somberly, then laughed.
    At seven p.m. Black climbed into the waiting BAE 125 executive jet and settled back into one of the six cream-colored high-backed leather chairs in the narrow passenger section. Except for the diplomatic bag,he was the aircraft’s only passenger. He felt a little foolish, but under the circumstances time really was of the essence. If Selman-Housein was serious about his intentions, it meant that something big was up. With Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez’s bowel cancer metastasizing to his liver and his lungs, the thought of one or the other of the two elderly Castro brothers casting off this mortal coil was the kind of thing that precipitated coups and revolutions. The world was in enough trouble without the Caribbean being hit by a political hurricane.
    A white-jacketed RAF steward appeared from the front section of the jet and offered him coffee and biscuits. Black accepted and the steward disappeared again. Black ate the biscuits and drank the coffee, then dimmed the light and sat in the darkness, looking out at the night. The black featureless slab of the St. George’s Channel slid by forty thousand feet below their wings. Black smiled. Once upon a time his father had told him a story about crossing the same channel on his way to finding an assassin hell-bent on murdering the king and queen.
    Morris Black, his father, had taken a certain ironic pride in being the only Jew working as a detective at Scotland Yard, although he had been fully aware that he would never rise any higher in the force because of that fact. Perhaps because of that he’d become the foremost murder investigator that organization hadever seen and was called in to deal with the most difficult cases. One of those cases, which he wouldn’t ever discuss in detail until the day he died, had involved him in the intrigues of World War Two intelligence, initially landing him in the Special Operations Executive and eventually, after the war and for the rest of his life, with MI6. Somewhere early along the way, his father, already a young widower by then, had met, become involved with and eventually married his mother, Katherine Sanderson Copeland, who’d been OSS posted to England under Wild Bill Donovan during the war and a CIA officer under Hillenkoetter, Bedell-Smith, John Foster Dulles and John McCone after the war.
    He’d loved both his parents very much and had been devastated when both died within a year of each other when he was in his late twenties, but they’d left him with an enduring affection for both the United States and England, an Oxford education, dual citizenship and a legacy’s introduction to the intelligence establishment of both countries. For that very reason he’d spent the last ten years as Washington liaison between MI6 and the CIA. Ireland was just a