Red Templar Read Online Free PDF Page B

and a younger one with dark oily hair who wore a brown leather coat.
    The older one spoke. “You are Brother Theodore Dimitrov?”
    “Yes.”
    “You know why we are here?”
    “To torture me and force me to tell you things you wish to know.”
    The younger one snickered. “We have people in Sofia who do that.”
    “We’re just here to accompany you, Brother Dimitrov. The best thing would be to come peacefully.”
    “I’m afraid I can’t do that,” answered Dimitrov.
    “Yes, you can, priest,” said the younger one. He took a weapon out from under his coat. It was a Veresk, an older Russian-made version of an Uzi, which explained the long coat.
    “Put that away, Kostya,” said the older one, taking out his own weapon from under his jacket, this one a much more discreet Yarygin nine-millimeter. He held it loosely in his hand. “Please, Brother Dimitrov. I would like to do this without any unpleasantness.”
    “I’m afraid I can’t accommodate you,” answered the monk. The younger one made a threatening gesture with the little submachine gun. The monk wondered for a brief moment which it would be. He decided on the older one. An object lesson for the young man in the leather coat. He took his hands out from between the bell-like sleeves of his robe. In his right hand he held the other weapon his father had taken from the NKVD agent just after the war. The Korovin .25 he’d given the American had been the NKVD agent’s backup gun, worn in a concealed holster on the hip. The other weapon, worn in a shoulder holster, was a Tokarev TT-33, a rough knockoff of the classic Browning .45 and just as powerful. The monk pulled the trigger twice, hitting the older man in the chest and the belly. The older man looked surprised, vomited blood and slid to the floor. The one the older man had called Kostya lifted the Veresk and frantically squeezed the trigger. Nothing happened.
    Dimitrov turned the old Tokarev on the boy in the coat and waited while he flipped off the safety. Killing the young man would serve only to prolong things. Eventually they’d find him, torture him, and in the end they would kill him anyway. Brother Theodore Dimitrov took the last long seconds to speak to his God, and then the church filled with the screams of the boy and the thunder of his weapon and then there was nothing.

6
    “We have—
¿cómo se dice? una cola
—a tail?” Eddie said.
    “We’re being followed?” Holliday answered, startled. He looked in the rearview mirror of the stodgy old Moskvich he’d rented in Istanbul. There was no traffic behind them on the narrow coast road running along the rocky cliffs that dropped down to the Black Sea. To the left of the deserted old highway there was nothing but scrub forest and wooded hills.
    “Sí.”
Eddie nodded. “I have been watching.” He spoke softly. In the backseat a less flatulent Genrikhovich was asleep again. “Three of them. A red BMW, an old KrAZ truck with a . . . thing on the front, and also there is something that looks like one of those old ZiL limousines El Comandante used to drive around in. Black and very big.” The tall Cuban shrugged. “
No estoy seguro.
Maybe a Chaika.”
    “I don’t see anything,” said Holliday, checking the mirror again. The highway was still empty. The very fact that Eddie had seen three vehicles of any kind was reason enough for suspicion.
    “They keep back most of the time and they . . .
¿cambiar de posición?
”
    “Switch places?”
    “
Sí
, that is what they do. Switch places to try to make it seem like they are not together. An old trick of the Seguridad del Estado in my country when they followed dissidents.” He laughed quietly. “Three men, three different hats.
¡Muy estúpido!
”
    Holliday looked in the mirror again. This time he saw the BMW. He wasn’t much of a car buff, but it looked like one of the bigger models from the eighties or early nineties.
    “Shit,” said Holliday. Eddie checked the side