The Last Templar Read online

  “Hundreds of years ago, we didn’t know better. People could barely read and write. Today, in our so-called enlightened age, what excuse do we have for such abysmal behavior? Man’s mind, his intellect, may have progressed, but I fear his soul has been left behind—and, I would even argue, regressed. Man has demonstrated time and again that he is a savage beast at heart, and, even with the Church telling us we’re accountable to a greater power, we still manage to behave atrociously. Imagine what it would be like without the Church. But it’s obvious that we’re losing our ability to inspire. We’re not there for the people, the Church is just not there for them anymore. Even worse, we’re being used as an excuse for wars and bloodshed. We’re spiraling toward a terrifying spiritual crisis, Agent Reilly. This discovery could not be happening at a worse time.”

  Brugnone fell silent and looked across the room at Reilly.

  “Maybe it’s inevitable, then,” Reilly offered in a resigned, subdued voice. “Maybe it’s a story that’s run its course.”

  “Perhaps the Church is dying a slow death,” Brugnone agreed. “After all, all religions wither away and die at some point, and ours has lasted longer than most. But a sudden revelation like this…Despite its failings, the Church is still a huge part of people’s lives. Millions out there rely on their faith to get them through their daily existence. It still manages to provide solace, even to its lapsed members in their times of need. And ultimately, faith provides us all with something that’s crucial to our very existence: it helps us overcome our primal fear of death and the dread of what may lie beyond the grave. Without their faith in a risen Christ, millions of souls would simply be cast adrift. Make no mistake, Agent Reilly, allowing this to come out would plunge the world into a state of despair and disillusion unlike anything we’ve ever seen.”

  An oppressive silence descended on the room, pressing down heavily on Reilly. There was no escape from the unsettling thoughts that were blockading his mind. He thought back to where this journey had all begun for him, standing on the steps of the Met with Aparo on the night of the horsemen’s rampage, and wondered how he had managed to end up here, at the very epicenter of his faith, engaged in a deeply disturbing conversation he would have much rather never had.

  “How long have you known?” he finally asked the cardinal.

  “Me, personally?”

  “Yes.”

  “Since I took my present post. Thirty years.”

  Reilly nodded to himself. It seemed an awfully long time to have to labor under doubts like those that were now battering him. “But you’ve come to terms with it.”

  “Come to terms?”

  “You accept it,” Reilly clarified.

  Brugnone mulled it over for a moment, his eyes darkly troubled. “I will never come to terms with it, in the sense that I believe you mean. But I have learned to accommodate it. That’s the best that I’ve been able to do.”

  “Who else knows?” Reilly could hear the condemnation in his own voice, and he knew that Brugnone heard it too.

  “A handful of us.”

  Reilly wondered about what that meant. What about the pope? Does he know? He felt he really wanted to know—he couldn’t imagine the pope not knowing—but he held back from asking the question. Only so many blows at a time. Instead, another idea was vying for his attention. His investigative instincts were stirring, clawing their way out of the mire of his besieged mind.

  “How do you know it’s real?”

  Brugnone’s eyes brightened, and the edge of his mouth broke into a faint smile. He seemed heartened by Reilly’s hopeful defense, but his dire tone quickly smothered any such hope. “The pope sent his most eminent experts to Jerusalem when the Templars first discovered it. They confirmed it to be genuine.”

  “But that was almost a thousand years ago,” Reilly argued. “They could have easily been fooled. What if it were a forgery? From what I’ve heard, it wasn’t beyond the Templars’ capabilities to pull off something like this. And yet you’re ready to accept it as fact without even seeing it…?” The implication hit Reilly just as the words tumbled out of his mouth. “Which can only mean you’ve always doubted the story in the gospels…?”

  Brugnone met Reilly’s consternation with a beaming, comforting expression. “There are those who believe the story was only ever meant to be taken metaphorically; that to truly understand Christianity is to understand the essence of the message at its heart. However, most believers take every word in the Bible as being, for want of a better term, the gospel truth. I suppose I fall somewhere in the middle. Perhaps we all walk a fine line between freeing our imaginations to the wonders of the story and allowing our rational minds to doubt its veracity. If what the Templars found was in fact a forgery, it would certainly help make us more comfortable with spending more time on the more inspirational side of that line, but until we find what they were carrying on that ship…’’ He framed Reilly with an ardent stare. “Will you help us?”

  For a moment Reilly did not answer. He studied the deeply lined face of the man before him. Although he felt that the cardinal harbored a deep-seated core of honesty, he had no illusions about the motives of De Angelis, and he knew that helping them would inevitably mean working with the monsignor, a prospect that held little appeal to him. He glanced over at De Angelis. Nothing he had heard did anything to alleviate his mistrust of the duplicitous priest, nor dampen his contempt for the man’s methods. He knew he would have to figure out how to deal with him at some point in the future. But there were more pressing matters at hand. Tess was somewhere out there, alone with Vance, and there was a potentially devastating discovery looming over millions of unsuspecting souls.

  He turned his gaze to Brugnone. “Yes,” was his simple reply.

  Chapter 72

  A light southeasterly wind stroked the waters around the Savarona, conjuring up a fine salty mist that Tess could almost taste as she stood on the aft deck of the converted trawler. She relished the freshness of the mornings out at sea, as well as the calming serenity that came with each sunset. It was the long hours in between that were proving difficult.

  They’d been lucky to find the Savarona at such short notice. From the Caribbean to the coast of China, the demand for undersea exploration vessels had boomed in recent years, limiting availability and fueling prices. In addition to the marine biologists, oceanographers, oil companies, and documentary filmmakers that traditionally accounted for most of that demand, two new groups of end users were now driving the market: adventure divers, a growing legion of people who were willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars for a chance to get up close and personal with the Titanic or cozy up to hydrothermal vents eight thousand feet below the surface of the ocean near the Azores; and treasure hunters, or, as they preferred to be known these days, “commercial archaeologists.”

  The Internet had played a crucial role in helping locate the research ship. A few phone calls and a short flight later, Vance and Tess had made their way to the port of Piraeus, in Athens, where the Savarona was moored. Its captain, a tall, striking Greek adventurer called George Rassoulis who sported a tan that looked like it went deep enough to reach his bones, had initially turned down Vance’s proposal due to a scheduling conflict. Preparations were already under way for him to take a small group of historians and a film crew into the northern Aegean in search of a lost fleet of Persian triremes. Rassoulis could only offer his services to Vance for no more than three weeks before having to take his party north, and three weeks, he had explained, wouldn’t be anywhere near enough. As it was, his ship had been booked for two months, which was in itself a relatively short window given that locating ancient shipwrecks successfully was something akin to finding a needle in a haystack. But then most expeditions lacked something Vance had at his disposal: the astrolabe, which, he hoped, would narrow the location of his quarry down to within ten square miles.

  Vance had told Rassoulis that they were after a Crusader vessel, hinting at the possibility of it ca
rrying gold and other valuables that were being spirited out of the Holy Land after the fall of Acre. Intrigued, Rassoulis had reluctantly agreed to take them on, swept along by Vance’s enthusiasm, the professor’s infectious belief in the ancient instrument’s ability to deliver them the Falcon Temple within that limited time frame, as well as a tinge of greed. The captain was more than happy to indulge Vance’s request for total discretion. He was used to treasure hunters—commercial archaeologists—and their need to avoid publicity. And given that he had negotiated a cut of the treasure’s value for himself, it was also in his best interests to make sure no outsiders crashed their party. He had explained to Vance how the ship would trawl the search site from the outside in for no more than a few hours at a time before sailing away to other “fake” search spots in order to divert attention from their target area, a tactic that suited Vance perfectly.

  What Tess was now rediscovering—the last time she’d been through it, she remembered, was off the coast of Alexandria in Egypt, the time Clive Edmondson had made his clumsy pass—was that the trawling process required a lot of patience, something she didn’t exactly have in abundance right now. She was desperate to find out what secrets lay beneath the gentle swell that undulated beneath her feet, and she knew they were very close. She could feel it, and it made the long spells at the railing even harder to bear.

  As the hours floated by, she would drift away into her thoughts, her eyes unconsciously riveted on the two cables that trailed behind the old ship and disappeared beneath its foamy wake. One pulled a low-frequency side-scan sonar, which mapped every noticeable protrusion on the undersea surface; the other dragged a magnetic resonance magnetometer, which would detect any residual iron in the wreck. There had been a couple of moments of excitement in the previous days. On each occasion, the sonar had detected something, and the ship’s ROV—the remotely operated vehicle, affectionately named Dori after the absent-minded fish in Finding Nemo—had been sent down to investigate. Each time, Tess and Vance had rushed into the control room of the Savarona, hearts racing, full of hope. They had sat there, eyes glued to the monitors, watching the hazy images coming back from Dori’s camera, their imaginations spurred into overdrive, only to have their hopes dashed by the realization that what the sonar had found wasn’t exactly what they had been hoping for: in one instance, it was a wreck-sized outcropping of rock and, in the other, the remains of a twentieth-century fishing boat.

  The rest of the time was spent waiting, and hoping, at the railing. As the days drifted by, Tess’s mind roamed the recent events of her life. She found herself constantly reliving the moments that had led to her being here, sixty kilometers off the coast of Turkey, on a diving ship with a man who had led an armed robbery on the Met in which people had been killed. Her decision to leave Reilly and join Vance haunted her over the first few days. She would feel pangs of guilt and remorse and experience panic attacks, and she often had to work hard to smother an urge to leave the ship at any cost and get away. Those worries had slowly subsided with each passing day. At times, when she wondered about whether or not she should have done it all, she did her best to rationalize her decisions and push the unsettling thoughts away, convincing herself that what she was doing was important. Not just to her—although, as she’d told Reilly, a discovery like this would make a huge difference to her career and, by extension, to hers and Kim’s financial security—but to millions of others around the world, a world in which Kim would grow up. A better, truer world, she hoped. Ultimately, though, she knew it was pointless to try and justify it. It was something she felt inexplicably compelled to do.

  One concern she couldn’t smother was about Reilly. She thought about him a lot. She wondered how he was and where he was. She thought about the way she had abandoned him and run off like a thief in the night and found it hard to rationalize. It had been wrong, horribly wrong, and she knew it. She had endangered his life. She’d left him out there, in the middle of nowhere—and with a sniper on the loose. How could she have done something so irresponsible? She wanted to know he was all right; she wanted to apologize to him, to try to explain why she’d done it, and it pained her to think that this was one blow for which she would never be able to make amends, at least not as far as he was concerned. But she also knew that Vance had been right when he had said that Reilly would hand their discovery over to people who would bury it forever—and that was something she couldn’t live with. Either way, she realized, their relationship had been doomed—ironically, by the very thing that had brought them together.

  Presently, with a six-foot swell rolling lazily under it, the Savarona turned to begin yet another run down the premapped grid. Tess’s gaze drifted away from the cables and up to the horizon, where wisps of dark clouds were intruding on an otherwise clear sky. She felt a tightness in her chest. Something else had been nagging at her ever since the night she had driven off with Vance. It was an unsettling feeling that was always there, clawing away at her from the inside, never letting go, and, with the completion of each trawling run of the Savarona, it got harder and harder to ignore: was she doing the right thing? Had she thought things through enough? Were certain secrets better left buried? Was pursuing the truth in this case a wise and noble quest, or was she helping unleash a terrible calamity on an unsuspecting world?

  Her doubts were cut short by the appearance of Vance’s tall figure. He stepped out from the wheelhouse and joined her at the railing. He seemed annoyed.

  “Nothing yet?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “After this run, we’ll have to clear out of here for the day.” He stared out, sucking in a chestful of ocean air. “I’m not worried, though. Three more days and we’ll have covered the entire search area.” He turned to face her and smiled. “We’ll find it. It’s out there, somewhere. It’s just playing hard to get, that’s all.”

  His gaze was distracted by a faint buzzing in the distance. His eyes narrowed as he scanned the horizon, his brow furrowing when he spotted the source of the noise. Tess followed his eye line and saw it too: a tiny dot, a helicopter, skimming the surface of the sea several miles away, on a seemingly parallel heading. Their eyes remained locked on it, tracking it as it followed a straight course before banking away. Within seconds, it was out of sight.

  “That’s for us, isn’t it?” Tess asked. “They’re looking for us.”

  “They can’t do much out here,” Vance said, shrugging. “We’re in international waters. Then again, they haven’t exactly been playing by the rules, have they?” He glanced up at the bridge, where an engineer was entering the control room. “You know what’s funny?”

  “I can’t imagine,” she said dryly.

  “The crew. There’s seven of them, and two of us, which makes nine,” he mused. “Nine. Just like Hughes de Payens and his gang. Poetic, don’t you think?”

  Tess looked away, failing to find anything even remotely poetic in what they were doing there. “I wonder if they ever had the same doubts.”

  Vance arched an eyebrow as he cocked his head and scrutinized her. “You’re not having second thoughts, are you?”

  “Aren’t you?” She was aware of the tremor in her voice and could see that Vance picked up on it. “What we’re doing out here, what we might find…doesn’t it worry you in the least?”

  “Worry?”

  “You know what I mean. Haven’t you stopped to think about the shock, the chaos this could bring?”

  Vance scoffed dismissively. “Man is a pitiful creature, Tess. Always desperate to find something or someone to worship, and not just by himself, no—it has to be worshipped by everybody, everywhere, at any cost. It’s been the bane of man’s existence since the dawn of time…Worried about it? I’m looking forward to it. I’m looking forward to liberating millions of people from an oppressive lie. What we’re doing is a natural step forward in man’s spiritual evolution. It’ll be the beginning of a new age.”

  “You talk about it as though it’s going to be greeted with p
arades and fireworks, but it’s the exact opposite, you know that. It’s happened before. From the Sassanids to the Incas, history’s riddled with civilizations that just collapsed after their gods were discredited.”

  Vance was unmoved. “They were civilizations built on lies, on shifting sands—just like ours. But you worry too much. Times have changed. The world today is a bit more sophisticated than that.”

  “They were the most advanced civilizations of their time.”

  “Give those poor souls out there some credit, Tess. I’m not saying it won’t be painless, but…they can handle it.”

  “What if they can’t?”

  He held his palms out in a mock helpless gesture, but there was nothing helpless about his tone. He was dead serious. “So be it.”

  Tess’s eyes stayed locked on his for a moment before she turned away. She stared out toward the horizon. Wisps of gray clouds seemed to be materializing out of nowhere, and, in the distance, whitecaps were now flecking an otherwise uniformly dark sea.

  Vance leaned against the railing next to her. “I’ve thought about this a lot, Tess, and, on balance, I have no doubt that we’re doing the right thing. Deep down, you know I’m right.”

  She didn’t doubt he’d thought about it a lot. She knew he’d been consumed by it both academically and personally, but he’d always considered it from a distorted point of view, through a lens that was shattered by the tragic deaths of his loved ones. But had he thought deeply enough about how something like this would affect virtually every living soul on the planet? How it would put into question not just the Christian faith, but the notion of faith itself? How it would be seized upon by the enemies of the Church, how it would polarize people, and how millions of true believers would quite possibly lose the spiritual core that sustained their lives?

  “They’ll fight it, you know,” she declared, surprised by a hint of hope in her voice. “They’ll bring experts out of the woodwork to discredit it, they’ll use everything they can think of to prove that it’s just a hoax, and given your history…” She suddenly felt uncomfortable elaborating that point.