The Last Templar Read online

  The king and the pope. Together.

  This couldn’t be good.

  The king’s gaze was fixed on de Molay, but the broken man wasn’t interested in him right now. His eyes were locked on the diminutive man in the cape who stood there fidgeting nervously, avoiding his look. De Molay wondered at the pope’s reticence. Was it because the man’s deception and his subtle manipulation of the king had precipitated the fall of the Knights Templar? Or was it that he simply couldn’t bear to see the grievously misshapen limbs, the rank open sores, or the unhealed flesh of putrefying wounds?

  The king stepped closer. “Nothing?” he snarled at a man hovering beyond the edge of the group. The man stepped forward, and de Molay saw that it was indeed Gaspard Chaix, the torturer, his eyes downcast, his head shaking from side to side.

  “Nothing,” the stubbly man replied.

  “Damn him to hell,” the king burst out with a voice that was filled with the undercurrent of fury that consumed him.

  You’ve already done that, de Molay thought. He saw Gaspard look his way, the eyes, beneath thick brows, dead as the stones that made up the floor. The king moved forward, peering closely at de Molay, a handkerchief held against his nose to protect him from a stench that the grand master knew to be there but had long ago ceased to notice.

  The king’s whispery voice sliced the stale air. “Talk, damn you. Where is the treasure?”

  “There is no treasure,” de Molay simply replied, his voice barely audible even to himself.

  “Why must you be stubborn?” the king rasped. “What end does it serve? Your brothers have revealed all; your sordid initiation ceremonies, your humble Knights of the Cross denying the divinity of Christ, spitting on the Cross, even urinating on it. They’ve admitted…everything.”

  Slowly, de Molay licked at his cracked lips with a swollen tongue. “Under torture such as this,” he managed, “they would confess to killing God Himself.”

  Philip inched closer to him. “The Holy Inquisition will prevail,” he said indignantly. “That much should be obvious to a man of your intellect. Just give me what I want and I’ll spare your life.”

  “There is no treasure,” de Molay repeated with the tone of a man resigned to never convincing those who heard him. For a long time, de Molay had sensed that Gaspard Chaix believed him, even though he had never faltered in his brutal assaults upon his victim’s flesh. He also knew that the pope believed him, but the head of the Church wasn’t about to let the king in on his little secret. The king, on the other hand, needed the riches he knew the Knights Templar had amassed over the past two hundred years, and his needs overwhelmed the conclusion any sane man would have reached at seeing the broken man hanging from the wall before him.

  “It’s useless.” The king turned away, still angry but now apparently as resigned as his victim. “The treasure must have been spirited away that first night.”

  De Molay watched the pope, whose face was still turned away. The man’s moves were brilliantly executed, he thought. The grand master felt a perverse satisfaction in knowing it. And it stoked his determination even more, for the wily man’s actions only confirmed the nobility of the Templars’ goal.

  The king looked coldly at the heavyset torturer. “How many of them still live within these walls?”

  De Molay’s entire body went rigid. For the first time, he was going to learn of the fate of his brothers from the Paris Temple. Gaspard Chaix told the king that, apart from the grand master himself, only his deputy, Geoffroi de Charnay, survived.

  The old Templar shut his eyes, his consciousness flooded in a tangle of horrific images. All gone, he thought. And yet we came so close. If only…If only word had come, all those years ago, from the Falcon Temple, from Aimard and his men.

  But nothing had.

  The Falcon Temple—and its precious cargo—had simply vanished.

  The king turned and took one final look at the broken man. “End it,” he ordered.

  The torturer shuffled closer. “When, Your Majesty?”

  “Tomorrow morning,” the king said, the prospect perversely brightening his spirits.

  Hearing the words, de Molay felt something spread over him that he didn’t recognize at first. It was a feeling he hadn’t experienced in many years.

  Relief.

  Through hooded eyes, he glanced toward the pope and saw his stifled delight.

  “What about their possessions?” the pope asked, his voice quavering. By now, de Molay knew, all that would remain was anything that couldn’t be sold to help pay off the king’s debts. “The books, papers, artifacts. They belong to the Church.”

  “Then take them.” The king waved a dismissive hand before casting one last seething glance at de Molay and storming out of the chamber, his entourage trailing hurriedly after him.

  For the briefest of instants, the eyes of the pope and de Molay met before Clement could turn and rush from the chamber. In that brief space of time, de Molay had read the pope’s mind, confirming the small man for what he was: a scheming opportunist who had manipulated the greedy king for his own ends. For the Church’s ends.

  A scheming manipulator who had bested him.

  But de Molay couldn’t give him the satisfaction of believing it. He seized the opportunity and rallied himself, summoning all of his strength and channeling it into a glare of confident defiance that he beamed at his nemesis. For a fleeting second, a look of fear crossed the pope’s weathered features before he composed his face into a stern gaze and lifted up his cowl.

  The grand master’s cracked lips curled into what would have once been a smile. He knew he’d succeeded in sowing doubt in the small man’s mind.

  A victory of sorts.

  The pope wouldn’t sleep well tonight.

  You may have won this battle, de Molay thought. But our war is far from over. And with that thought, he closed his eyes and awaited his approaching death.

  Chapter 21

  Reilly did his best to avoid appearing conflicted. Much as he was enjoying sitting there with Tess, he couldn’t see the relevance of everything she’d just told him. A bunch of selfless knights grow into a medieval superpower only to get their wings clipped and disappear ignominiously into the annals of history. What did that have to do with a gang of armed robbers trashing a museum seven hundred years later?

  “You think the guys at the museum were wearing Templar outfits?” he asked.

  “Yes. The Templars wore simple clothing, very different from the gaudy outfits other knights wore back then. Remember, they were religious monks, committed to poverty. The white robes symbolized the purity of life that was expected of them, and the red crosses, the color of blood, advertised their special relationship with the Church.”

  “Okay, but if you asked me to draw a knight, I’d probably come up with something that looks pretty close to that without consciously thinking about the Templars. It’s a pretty iconic look, isn’t it?”

  Tess nodded. “Look, on its own, I agree, it’s not conclusive. But then there’s the encoder.”

  “This is the object the fourth horseman took. The one you were next to.”

  Tess moved in a bit closer, seeming more driven now. “Yes. I looked it up. It’s far more advanced than anything that appeared for hundreds of years. I mean this thing is revolutionary. And the Templars were known to be masters of encryption. Codes were the backbone of their whole banking system. When the pilgrims traveling to the Holy Land deposited money with them, the receipts they were given were written in code, which could only be deciphered by Templars. That way, no one could forge a deposit note and cheat them. They were pioneers in this field and, somehow, this encoder fits their sophisticated, secretive methods.”

  “But why would a Templar encoder be part of the Vatican’s treasures?”

  “Because the Vatican and the king of France both conspired to bring down the Order. They were both after its wealth. It’s easy to imagine that whatever the Templars had in their preceptories ended up
either at the Louvre or in the Vatican.”

  Reilly looked uncertain. “You mentioned something about a Latin saying?”

  Tess visibly rallied herself. “That’s what got me started. The fourth horseman, the one who took the encoder. When he had it in his hands, it was like this big religious moment for him. Like he was in a trance. And as he held it, he said something in Latin. I think he said ‘Veritas vos liberabit.’”

  She waited to see if Reilly knew what it meant. His quizzical look indicated he didn’t. “It means ‘the truth will set you free.’ I looked into it, and, although it’s a very widely used saying, it also happens to be a marking on a Templar castle in the south of France.”

  Tess could see that he was pondering what she’d just told him, but she wasn’t sure how to read him. She fidgeted with her cup, downing the last of her coffee, which had by now gone cold, then decided to keep going.

  “I know it probably doesn’t sound like much, but that’s only until you start to understand the level of interest that the Templars inspire in people. Their origins, their activities and beliefs, and their violent demise are all shrouded in mystery. They have a huge following. You wouldn’t believe the amount of books and material I found about them, and I’ve only scratched the surface. It’s just phenomenal. And here’s the thing. What usually triggers off the conjecture is that their fabulous wealth was never recovered.”

  “I thought that was why the king of France rounded them up,” Reilly observed.

  “It’s what he was after. But he never found it. No one ever did. No gold, no jewels. Nothing. And yet the Templars were known to have a phenomenal treasure trove. One historian claims the Templars discovered one hundred forty-eight tons of gold and silver in and around Jerusalem when they first got there, even before the donations from across Europe started pouring in.”

  “And no one knows what happened to it?”

  “There are widely accepted claims that the night before the Templars were all arrested, twenty-four knights rode out of the Paris preceptory with several wagonloads of crates and escaped to the Atlantic port of La Rochelle. They’re supposed to have sailed away on board eighteen galleys, never to be seen again.”

  Reilly pondered the information. “So you’re saying the museum’s raiders were really after the encoder, in order to use it to somehow help them find the Templars’ treasure?”

  “Maybe. The question is, what was that treasure? Was it gold coins and jewelry, or something else, something more esoteric, something that,” she hesitated, “requires a slightly bigger leap of faith.” She waited to see how that sat with him.

  Reilly flashed her a comforting grin. “I’m still here, aren’t I?”

  She leaned forward and lowered her voice unconsciously. “A lot of these theories claim that the Templars were part of an age-old conspiracy to discover and guard some arcane knowledge. It could be a lot of things. They were said to be the custodians of many holy relics—there’s a French historian who even thinks they had the embalmed head of Jesus—but one theory I kept coming across and that seemed to hold more water than the others was that it has to do with the Holy Grail—which as you probably know isn’t necessarily an actual cup or some kind of physical ‘chalice’ that Jesus supposedly drank from at the Last Supper, but could well be a metaphorical reference to a secret concerning the real events surrounding His death and the survival of His bloodline into medieval times.”

  “Jesus’s bloodline?”

  “Heretical as it may seem, this line of thought—and it’s a very popular one, believe me—claims Jesus and Mary Magdalene had a child—maybe, probably more than one—that was raised in secret and hidden from the Romans, and that Jesus’s bloodline has been a closely guarded secret for the last two thousand years, with all kinds of shadowy societies protecting His descendants and passing on their secret to a select group of ‘illuminati.’ Da Vinci, Isaac Newton, Victor Hugo, pretty much any illustrious name over the centuries—they’re all supposed to have been part of this secret cabal of the holy bloodline’s protectors.” Tess paused and watched for Reilly’s reaction. “I know it sounds ludicrous, but it’s a popular story, a lot of people have worked on researching it, and we’re not just talking about fiction bestsellers either, we’re talking serious scholars and academics as well.”

  She studied Reilly, wondering what he must be thinking. If I had him with the treasure bit, I’ve definitely blown it now. Leaning back, she had to admit it sounded more and more preposterous now, hearing herself verbalize it out loud.

  Reilly seemed to think about it for a moment, then a faint smile crossed his lips. “Jesus’s bloodline, huh? If He did have a kid or two, and assuming they then had children of their own, and so on…after two thousand years—which is, what, something like seventy or eighty generations later—it’s exponential, there’d be thousands of them, the planet would be crawling with His descendants, wouldn’t it?” He chuckled. “People really take this stuff seriously?”

  “Absolutely. The Templars’ missing treasure is one of the great unsolved mysteries of all time. It’s easy to see why people are drawn to it. The premise itself has a great hook: nine knights show up in Jerusalem, claiming to want to defend thousands of pilgrims. Just nine of them. Seems pretty ambitious by any standard outside of The Magnificent Seven, don’t you think? On hearing this, King Baldwin gives them a prime slice of Jerusalem real estate, the Temple Mount, the site of the second Temple of Solomon that was destroyed by Titus’s legions in 70 AD, its treasure plundered and brought back to Rome. So here’s the big what if: what if the Temple’s priests hid something there when they knew the Romans were about to pounce, something the Romans didn’t find?”

  “But the Templars did.”

  She nodded. “Perfect fodder for myths. It stays buried there for a thousand years, and then they dig it up. Then there’s the so-called Copper Scroll they found in Qumran.”

  “The Dead Sea Scrolls are part of this too?”

  Slow down, Tess. But she couldn’t help herself, and kept plowing on. “One of the scrolls specifically mentions huge quantities of gold and other valuables buried under the Temple itself, supposedly in twenty-four hoards. But it also mentions a treasure of an unspecified kind. What was it? We don’t know. It could be anything.”

  “Okay, so where does the Turin Shroud figure into all this?” Reilly mused.

  For a fleeting moment, an irritated look crossed her fine features before she composed her face into a gracious smile. “You’re not buying into any of this, are you?”

  Reilly raised his hands, looking slightly contrite. “No, look, I’m sorry. Please, keep going.”

  Tess collected her thoughts. “These nine ordinary knights are given part of a royal palace with stables, which were apparently big enough to accommodate two thousand horses. Why was Baldwin so generous toward them?”

  “I don’t know, maybe he was a forward thinker. Maybe he was blown away by their dedication.”

  “But that’s the thing,” she argued, undeterred. “They hadn’t done anything yet. They get given this huge base to work from, and what do our magnificent nine do? Do they go out and perform all sorts of heroic deeds and make sure the pilgrims get to their destinations, like they’re supposed to? No. They spend their first nine years in the Temple. They don’t leave it. They don’t go out, they don’t take on any new recruits. They just stay locked up there. For nine years.”

  “They either turned agoraphobic, or…”

  “Or it was one big scam. The most widely accepted theory—and personally, I think it makes sense—is they were digging. Looking for something buried there.”

  “Something the priests hid from Titus’s legionnaires a thousand years earlier.”

  She sensed that she was finally getting through to him, and her eyes were ablaze with conviction. “Exactly. The fact is that they lie low for nine years, then all of a sudden they burst onto the scene and start growing in stature and wealth at a dizzying rate, with the Vatican bac
king them wholeheartedly. Maybe they found something there, something buried under the Temple that made it all possible. Something that made the Vatican bend over backward to keep them happy—and evidence of Jesus having fathered a child or two would certainly fit the bill.”

  Reilly’s face clouded over. “Hold on, you think they were blackmailing the Vatican? I thought they were soldiers of Christ? Doesn’t it make more sense that they found something that really pleased the Vatican, and the pope decided to reward them for their discovery?”

  Her face scrunched inward. “If that was the case, wouldn’t they have announced it to the world?” She eased back, seeming a bit lost as well. “I know, I’m still missing a piece to this puzzle. They did go on to fight for Christianity for two hundred years. But you’ve got to admit, it’s pretty intriguing.” She paused, studying him. “So do you think there’s anything in it?”

  Reilly weighed the information she’d so eagerly laid out for him. Regardless of how ridiculous it all sounded, he couldn’t simply dismiss it entirely. The attack at the Met was clearly symptomatic of something frighteningly warped; there was more behind its extreme staging than a simple heist, that much everyone agreed on. He knew how radical extremists latched onto some mythology, some core belief, and how they made it theirs; how gradually that mythology got twisted and distorted until its devotees completely lost touch with reality and went off the deep end. Could this be the link he was looking for? The Templar legends certainly seemed rife with distortion. Was someone out there so infatuated with the terrible fate of the Templars that they identified with them to the point of dressing up like them, taking revenge on the Vatican on their behalf, and perhaps even trying to recover their legendary treasure?

  Reilly’s eyes settled on her. “Do I think the Templars were the keepers of some big secret—good or bad—relating to the early days of the Church? I have no idea.”