The Templar Conspiracy by Paul Christopher

The fact was enough to make him take the bottle and its accompanying shot glass from his drawer and pour himself a wee dram.
    “I’ll go to the funeral if you’ll come with me to the game,” said the president, opening his eyes.
    “The game?” Morrie said. And then he remembered. “Not the Abbey School-Winter Falls High game?” The chief of staff groaned.
    “Glory days,” the president said with a grin.
    “For you, maybe,” said the chief of staff. He snorted. “You were the star, the captain of the team. I was a third-string goalie because I had weak ankles.”
    “It’ll be fun,” said the president.
    “Shannon O’Doyle,” said Morrie. He poured himself another shot.
    “Shannon O’Doyle.” The president nodded, remembering the Winter Falls Snow Queen as though it was yesterday. All that long blond hair and the whisper of her panty hose when she crossed her legs.
    “You sure you want to remind the electorate you went to a fancy prep school?”
    “What have I got to lose?” the president said.

12
    They woke early, asked for a car to be delivered from Hertz, had a quick breakfast and were on the road to Aigle by nine. They took Highway 1 out of Geneva and headed north, staying close to the shoreline of the long, silt-colored lake. They were almost halfway to Aigle before anyone spoke.
    “Remind me why we’re going to this place,” said Peggy.
    “Aigle is the area code on that number on the back of Tritt’s desk. When I called the number it was for a vineyard called Chateau Royale des Pins. I did some checking on the computer; it’s about two miles outside the town. Apparently they make a nice Chablis.”
    “Never cared much for white wine,” said Brennan from the backseat.
    “It sounds like a bit of a wild-goose chase,” said Peggy. “If there’s anything to find it will be at that private garage on the French side.” She shook her head and stared out the window at the passing landscape. There was a dusting of snow on the ground and a cold wind was blowing in gusts, pushing a flotilla of sailboats around the lake. “We should be in Rome,” she grumbled softly. “That’s where the action’s going to be.”
    “That would be your veritable needle in a haystack.” Brennan laughed. “There’s two and a half million people in Rome. How do you propose we track him down?”
    “You got a picture of him in that file from your friend in counterintelligence, didn’t you?” Peggy said.
    “Tritt must know there’s a CIA file on him at the very least,” said Holliday. “It’s easily a decade old. He’ll have changed his look since then.” The photograph in the computer file showed a handsome, narrow-faced man with aristocratic features and neatly parted honey blond hair. If he was an actor he could have played the part of an Oxford student or the ne’er-do-well son of an English lord.
    “Still, it’s a photograph of the bastard; it’s something to go on.”
    Holliday couldn’t fault Peggy’s enthusiasm, but after half a lifetime in intelligence he’d learned that enthusiasm, intuition and hunches had little to do with it. Finding and identifying Tritt would be a matter of hard, slogging work, assembling small pieces of information like a jigsaw puzzle until the whole picture took shape. Privately he gave them one-in-a-million odds on finding the assassin before the president arrived. They simply didn’t have enough time.
    Even though traffic was fairly light, it took them the better part of two hours to make the fifty-mile trip around the lake to Aigle at the head of the Rhône valley. The town was a quaint little Alpine village of eight thousand, named for the eagles that circled on the upward air currents of the valley below, looking for rabbits taking shelter under the camouflaging grapevines in the summer months and foxes in the winter.
    Aigle had been the seat of government for the canton since the eleventh century. Still the seat of municipal government for the district,