The Templar Salvation (2010) Read Online Free PDF Page B

sorry, Father.”
    —while the other dove into Reilly’s jacket’s side pocket and pulled out a small canister of mouth freshener, swung it right up to the archivist’s startled face, and pumped a cloud of spray right at him. The man stared at Reilly with wide, terrified eyes as the mist swirled around his head—then he coughed twice before his legs just collapsed under him. Reilly caught him as he fell and set him down gently on the hard floor.
    The colorless, odorless liquid wasn’t mouth freshener.
    And if the archivist wasn’t going to die from it, Reilly needed to do something else—fast.
    He reached into another pocket and pulled out a small ceramic syringe, yanked its cap off, and plunged it into a throbbing vein in the man’s forearm. He checked his pulse and waited till he was sure the opioid antagonist had done its job. Without it, the Fentanyl—a fast-acting, incapacitating opiate that was part of the Bureau’s small and unpublicized arsenal of non-lethal weapons—could send the prefect into a coma, or as in the tragic case of more than a hundred hostages in a Moscow theater a few years back, it could kill him. A quick chaser of Naloxone was crucial to make sure the archivist kept breathing—which he now was.
    Reilly stayed with him long enough to confirm the drug’s effect, countering the caustic discomfort he felt at what he had just done to their unsuspecting host by thinking of Tess and what Sharafi had told him her abductor had done to the schoolteacher. Feeling that the archivist’s breathing had stabilized, he nodded. “We’re clear.”
    The Iranian pointed down the aisle. “He looked that way when you mentioned the fond . Which fits. ‘T’ is the next letter.”
    “We’ve got around twenty minutes before he wakes up, maybe less,” Reilly told him as he stalked down the aisle. “Let’s make them count.”

Chapter 3

    T ess Chaykin’s lungs hurt. So did her eyes. And her back. In fact, there wasn’t much of her that didn’t hurt.
    How much longer are they going to keep me like this ?
    She’d lost all sense of time—all sense of anything, for that matter. She knew her eyes were taped shut. As was her mouth. Her wrists too, behind her back. And her knees and ankles. A twenty-first-century mummy of shiny silver duct tape and—something else too. A soft, thick, padded cocoon, wrapped around her. Like a sleeping bag. She felt it with her fingers. Yes, that’s what it was. A sleeping bag. Which explained why she was drenched in sweat.
    That was just about all she was sure of.
    She didn’t know where she was. Not exactly, anyway. She felt like she was in a cramped space. A hot, cramped space. She thought she might be in the back of a van, or in the trunk of a car. She wasn’t sure of it, but she could hear the distorted, muffled sounds coming in through the tape around her ears. From outside. The sounds of a busy street. Cars, motorcycles, scooters, rumbling and buzzing past. But something about the sounds jarred her. Something felt out of place, wrong—but she couldn’t quite put her finger on it.
    She concentrated, trying to ignore the heaviness in her head and break through the fog that was clouding her memory. Vague recollections started to take shape. She remembered being grabbed at gunpoint on the way into town from the dig in Petra, Jordan, all three of them—she, her friend Jed Simmons, and the Iranian historian who’d sought them out. What was his name? Sharafi. Behrouz Sharafi, that was it. She remembered being locked into some grotty, windowless room. Not long after that, her abductor had made her call Reilly, in New York. Then she’d been drugged, injected with something. She could still feel the prick in her arm. And that was it, the last thing she remembered—how long ago was it now? She had no idea. Hours. A whole day, maybe? More?
    No idea.
    She hated being in here. It was hot and cramped and dark and hard and smelled of, well, car trunk. Not like the trunk of