Free Valley of the Templars by Paul Christopher Page A

and picked up a freezing-cold Coca-Cola from the cooler. He used the metal bottle opener hanging from a string threaded through a hole high on the side of the container and took a sip.
    He was surprised. It tasted exactly like the five-cent bottles he’d bought as a child from Pop Mercier’s grocery store down the street from Uncle Henry’s house in Fredonia, New York. You’d drop a nickel into the slot and it would allow you to drag your drink through a maze of metal tubes until it was free, dripping water and wonderfully chilled on a hot summer’s day.
    “It is the same as you remember, isn’t it, gringo?” Mama Oya said. “The Mexicans use sugar instead of corn syrup.”
    “Is that so?” Holliday said, trying to be calm in the face of a tiny old woman who seemed to be able to read his mind and then some. He took another long pull on the Coke. She was right; the taste was lighter and sweeter than the heavy goop they sold in cans now. It was like stepping into the past.
    “That is so, gringo.” The old woman smiled. “And yes, I was here on the night that Eddie disappeared.”
    “Did he speak with you?” Eddie asked.
    “Yes.”
    “You were still here so late at night?”
    “The Plaza des Armas is my home, gringo. I have no other. Domingo knew where I go to dream.”
    “What did he tell you, Mama Oya?”
    The old woman turned over the top card in her large deck and laid it out on the table. It was a tarot card, but unlike any Holliday had ever seen. It showed a dancing man, his belt hung with skulls, a machete in one hand, a severed head in the other and the face of the devil. The colors of the card were green and black, and the number 7 was printed above the image, as was the name Ogun printed in heavy, dark ink.
    “
Ogún oko dara obaniché aguanile ichegún iré,
” the old woman hissed. “He told me that if Eddiecame, to tell him that he had gone to the Valle del Muerte. The Valley of Death.”
    Other than looking a little silly, like Mr. Spock in the old
Star Trek
series, having a Bluetooth screwed into your earhole had a great number of advantages for the average intelligence agent—you no longer looked like a complete idiot talking to yourself in virtually any situation or environment and you could keep in touch with anyone else on your surveillance team. William Copeland Black sat on a stool in the Insomnia Coffee Shop on Grafton Street and kept an eye on Fusilier’s Gate, the main entrance to St. Stephen’s Green. It was a gray day, threatening rain, but there were still lots of people on the pedestrian mall just outside the big picture window of the coffee shop.
    Dr. Eugenio Selman-Housein, Fidel’s personal physician, was in play. After an afternoon of shopping on Grafton Street, he was supposed to enter the Green through the Fusilier’s Gate on his way back to the Shelburne. So far he was almost twenty minutes late. Black wasn’t worried—yet—but he was beginning to get that familiar stiffness in the back of his neck that meant something was going wrong.
    “Anything?” he said. There was a series of responding clicks in his ear. One click for no, two for yes. Where was the doctor?
    And suddenly there he was, walking right by the Insomnia’s window and stopping for the light at Grafton and King streets, a shopping bag in each hand, his expression clearly nervous. He was wearing a hideous Marks & Spencer green cardigan, gray trousers and brown shoes. He looked like a thin, badly dressed owl behind his wire-rimmed spectacles. The doctor crossed King Street to the shopping center on the corner, then crossed again to Fusilier’s Gate and walked into the park.
    “Got him. Target is in the park.” Two shopping bags. A black-and-gold one from Zara and a red-on-white one from H and M.”
    There was a voice in Black’s ear. “Three. I see him.”
    Black started silently counting to himself. At twenty-five, there was nothing; at forty-five, a man in his thirties wearing sunglasses, a