The Last Templar Read online

  “I was just visiting a friend. He was hurt that night.”

  “Is he okay?”

  “Yeah, he’ll be fine.”

  The elevator pinged, having reached the ground level. As he watched her walk out, she turned, seeming to make her mind up about bringing something up.

  “I’ve been meaning to contact your office again. Agent Gaines gave me her card that night.”

  “Amelia. We work together. I’m Reilly. Sean Reilly.” He extended his hand.

  Tess took it and told him her name.

  “Is it anything I can help you with?” he asked.

  “Well, it’s just…she said to call if I thought of anything, and, well, there’s this one thing I’ve been thinking about. It’s actually something my friend who’s here has been helping me with. But then I’m sure you guys have already looked into it.”

  “Not necessarily. And believe me, we’re always open to new leads. What is it?”

  “It’s that whole Templar thing.”

  Reilly clearly didn’t know what she was talking about. “What Templar thing?”

  “You know, the outfits they were wearing, the decoder they took. And the Latin saying one of the horsemen said when he grabbed it.”

  Reilly looked at her, perplexed. “Do you have time for a cup of coffee?”

  Chapter 19

  The café on the ground level of the hospital was almost empty. After they had brought their coffees to a table, Tess was surprised when the first thing Reilly did was ask if it was her daughter who’d been with her at the museum.

  “Yes, she was,” she said, smiling. “Her name’s Kim.”

  “She looks like you.”

  She was immediately disappointed. Even though she’d only glimpsed him fleetingly at the Met, and only actually met him minutes earlier, something about him felt comfortable. God, I’ve really got to get my male sensors recalibrated. She cringed as she waited for the inevitable guy-on-the-make’s traditional compliment. You don’t look old enough; I thought you were sisters; whatever. But he surprised her again when he asked, “Where was she when it all happened?”

  “Kim? My mom had taken her to the ladies’ room. While they were in there, she heard the uproar and decided to stay put.”

  “So they missed the bad part.”

  Tess nodded, curious as to his interest. “Neither of them saw anything.”

  “What about afterward?”

  “I went to find them and made sure we stayed away until the ambulances were gone,” she told him, still unsure about where he was going with this.

  “So she didn’t see any of the wounded or…”

  “No, just the damage in the Great Hall.”

  He nodded. “Good. But she obviously knows what happened.”

  “She’s nine, Agent Reilly. She’s everyone’s new best friend at school right now; they all want to know what it was like to be there.”

  “I can imagine. Still, you should really keep an eye on her. Even without actually witnessing it, something like this can have aftereffects, especially on someone that young. Could be just nightmares, could be more. Just keep an eye out, that’s all. You never know.”

  Tess was totally thrown by his interest in Kim. She dazedly nodded. “Sure.”

  Reilly sat back. “How about you? You were right in the thick of it.”

  Tess was intrigued. “How’d you know that?”

  “Security cameras. I saw you on the tape.” He wasn’t sure about whether or not that sounded mildly perverted. He hoped it didn’t, but he couldn’t tell from her look. “You okay?”

  “Yeah.” Tess flashed back to the horsemen trashing the museum and firing their guns and to the fourth horseman grabbing the encoder inches away from her, his horse literally breathing down her neck. It wasn’t a sight she’d ever forget, nor would the fear she felt soon dissipate. She tried not to show it. “It was pretty intense, but…somehow it was so surreal that, I don’t know, maybe I’ve tucked it away under the fiction section of my memory bank.”

  “Just as well.” He hesitated. “I’m sorry to be nosy, it’s just that I’ve been around circumstances like this and it’s not always easy to deal with.”

  She looked at him, brightening. “I understand. And I do appreciate your concern,” she said, mildly curious to note that while she was usually defensive when anyone talked to her about Kim, she did not take exception to this man. His concern appeared to be genuine.

  “So,” he said. “What’s all this stuff about Templars?”

  She edged closer, surprised. “You guys aren’t looking into any kind of Templar angle?”

  “Not that I’m aware of.”

  Tess felt deflated. “See, I knew it was nothing.”

  “Just tell me what you’re thinking.”

  “What do you know about them?”

  “Not much,” he confessed.

  “Well, the good news is you’re not a lunatic.” She smiled before quickly regretting her comment, which he didn’t get, and moving on. “Okay. Let’s see…1118. The First Crusade is over, and the Holy Land is back in Christian hands. Baldwin II is the King of Jerusalem, people across Europe are jubilant, and pilgrims are flocking to see what all the fuss was about. What the pilgrims often didn’t know was that they were venturing into dangerous territory. Once they’d ‘liberated’ the Holy Land, the crusading knights considered their vows fulfilled and went back to their homes in Europe, taking their plundered riches with them and leaving the area precariously surrounded by hostile Islamic states. The Turks and the Muslims who had lost much of their lands to the Christian armies weren’t about to forgive and forget, and a lot of the pilgrims heading there never made it to Jerusalem. They were attacked and robbed and often killed. Arab bandits were a constant threat to travelers, which kind of defeated the purpose of the Crusade in the first place.”

  Tess told Reilly how in a single incident that year, marauding Saracens ambushed and killed over three hundred pilgrims on the dangerous roads between the port city of Jaffa, where they landed on the coast of Palestine, and the holy city of Jerusalem. Bands of fighters soon became a fixture outside the walls of the city itself. And that’s when the Templars first made their appearance. Nine pious knights led by Hughes de Payens arrived at Baldwin’s palace in Jerusalem and offered their humble services to the king. They announced that they had taken the three solemn vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience but had added a fourth: a perpetual vow to protect the pilgrims on their journey from the coast to the city. Given the situation, the knights’ arrival was very timely. The crusading state was in desperate need of trained fighters.

  King Baldwin was very impressed by the religious knights’ dedication and gave them quarters in the eastern part of his palace, which stood on the site once occupied by King Solomon’s Temple. They became known as The Order of the Poor Knights of Christ and the Temple of Solomon—or, more simply, the Knights Templar.

  Tess leaned in. “The religious significance of the site Baldwin gave the burgeoning order is key,” she explained. Solomon had built the first temple in 950 BC. His father David had started the work following God’s command, building a temple to house the Ark of the Covenant, a portable shrine that contained the tablets of stone that were engraved with the commandments God gave Moses. The glorious reign of Solomon came to a close with his death, when eastern nations moved in and conquered the Jewish lands. The Temple itself was destroyed in 586 BC by the invading Chaldeans, who proceeded to take the Jews back to Babylon as slaves. More than five hundred years later, the Temple was rebuilt by Herod in an attempt to ingratiate himself with his Jewish subjects and demonstrate to them that their king, despite his Arab origins, was a devout follower of his adopted religion. It would be his crowning achievement: prominently dominating the Kidron Valley, the new Temple was a magnificent and elaborate building of a far grander design than its predecessor. Its inner sanctum, reached by two huge golden doors, housed the Holy of Holies, which was accessible only to the Jewish High
Priest.

  After Herod’s death, the Jewish rebelliousness was rekindled, and by 66 AD, the insurgents were back in control of Palestine. The Roman emperor Vespasian dispatched his son Titus to put down the rebellion. After fierce fighting for over six months, Jerusalem finally fell to the Roman legions in 70 AD. Titus commanded that the city, whose population was by now totally annihilated, be razed. And so, “the most wonderful edifice ever seen or heard of,” as it was described at the time by the historian Josephus, was lost again.

  A second Jewish rebellion, less than a hundred years later, was also crushed by the Romans. This time, all Jews were banned from Jerusalem and sanctuaries to Zeus and to the Roman god-emperor Hadrian were built on the Temple Mount. Six hundred years later, the site would see the building of another holy shrine: with the rise of Islam and the conquering of Jerusalem by the Arabs, the location of the holiest site of Judaism was to be redefined as the place from which the prophet Mohammed’s horse ascended to heaven. And so in 691 AD, the Dome of the Rock was built on the site by the Caliph Abd El-Malik. It has remained a shrine to Islam ever since, except for the period during which the Crusaders controlled the Holy Land when the Dome of the Rock was converted into a Christian church called the Tem-plum Domini, the “Temple of our Lord,” and when the Al-Aqsa mosque, built in the same compound, was turned into the headquarters of the burgeoning Knights Templar.

  The heroic idea of nine brave knights valiantly defending the vulnerable pilgrims quickly captured people’s imaginations across Europe. Many soon regarded the Templars with romantic reverence and offered themselves as new recruits. Nobles across Europe also paid generously to support them, showering them with gifts of money and land. This was all helped greatly by the fact that they were given papal blessings, a rare occurrence that meant a great deal at a time when all kings and all nations looked to the Papacy as the ultimate authority in Christendom. And so the Order grew, slowly at first, then much more rapidly. They were highly trained as fighters, and, as their successes in the field mounted, their activities widened. From their original mission of protecting the pilgrims, they gradually came to be regarded as the military defenders of the Holy Land.

  In less than a hundred years, the Templars became one of the wealthiest and most influential bodies in Europe, second only to the Papacy itself, owning huge tracts of land in England, Scotland, France, Spain, Portugal, Germany, and Austria. And with such an extensive network of territories and castles, they soon established themselves as the world’s first international bankers, arranging credit facilities for bankrupt royals across Europe, safeguarding the pilgrims’ funds, and effectively inventing the concept of the traveler’s check. Money in those days was just gold or silver, which was simply worth what it weighed. Instead of taking it with them and risking getting robbed, the pilgrims could deposit their money at a Templar house or castle anywhere in Europe, where they would be given a coded note for it. Once they reached their destination, they would go to the local Templar house, present the note, which would be decoded using their tightly guarded encryption practices, and draw that amount of money there.

  TESS LOOKED AT REILLY to make sure he was still with her. “What started off as a small team of nine well-intentioned noblemen dedicated to defending the Holy Land from the Saracens quickly became the most powerful and most secretive organization of its time, rivaling the Vatican in terms of wealth and influence.”

  “Then it all went wrong for them, didn’t it?” Reilly asked.

  “Yes. In a big way. The Muslim armies finally recaptured the Holy Land in the thirteenth century and sent the Crusaders packing, this time for good. There were no further Crusades. The Templars were the last to leave, after their defeat at Acre in 1291. When they got back to Europe, their whole raison d’être was gone. There were no pilgrims to escort, no Holy Land to defend. They had no home, no enemy, and no cause. And they didn’t have too many friends either. All that power and wealth had gone to their heads. The poor soldiers of Christ weren’t so poor anymore and had grown arrogant and greedy. And many royals, the king of France in particular, owed them a lot of money.”

  “And they came crashing down to earth.”

  “Crashed and burned,” Tess nodded. “Literally.” Tess took a sip from her coffee and told Reilly how a whisper campaign had started about the Templars, no doubt facilitated by the ritualistic secrecy with which the Order had conducted its initiation rites over the years. Soon, a shocking and outrageous litany of heresy charges was leveled at them.

  “What happened then?”

  “Friday the thirteenth,” Tess answered wryly. “The original version.”

  Chapter 20

  PARIS, FRANCE—MARCH 1314

  Slowly, Jacques de Molay’s consciousness returned.

  How long had it been this time? An hour? Two? The grand master knew it couldn’t possibly have been any longer than that. A few hours of unconsciousness would be a luxury that they would never allow.

  As the mists receded from his mind, he felt the usual stirrings of pain, and, as usual, he banished them. The mind was a strange and powerful thing, and, after all these years of imprisonment and torture, he had learned to use it like a weapon. A defensive weapon, but a weapon nevertheless, one with which he could counter at least some of what his enemies tried to accomplish.

  They could break his body, and they had, but his spirit and his mind, though damaged, were still his own.

  As were his beliefs.

  Opening his eyes, he saw that nothing had changed, although there was a curious difference he didn’t recognize at first. The walls of the cellar were still covered with a green slime that leaked onto the roughly cobbled floor, a floor that was almost level from the accumulation of dust, dried blood, and excrement on it. How much of the filth had come from his own body? A lot of it, he feared. After all, he had been here for…he concentrated his mind. Six years? Seven? Ample time in which to wreck his body.

  Bones had been broken, allowed to reset crudely, then broken again. Joints had been wrenched apart, tendons severed. He knew that he couldn’t do anything meaningful with his hands and arms, nor could he walk. But they couldn’t stop the movement of his mind. That was free to roam, to leave these dark, miserable dungeons beneath the streets of Paris and travel…anywhere.

  So, where would he go today? To the rolling farmlands of central France? To the foothills of the Alps? To the seashore, or beyond, back to his beloved Outremer?

  I wonder, he thought, and not for the first time, if I’m insane? Probably, he decided. To suffer everything the torturers who ruled this underground hellhole had inflicted on him, there was no way he could have retained his sanity.

  He concentrated a little harder on the time he had spent here. Now he had it. It was six and a half years since the night that the king’s men had overrun the Paris Temple.

  His Paris Temple.

  It was on a Friday, he remembered. October 13,1307. He’d been asleep, as had most of his fellow knights, when dozens of seneschals had stormed the preceptory at first light. The Knights Templar should have been better prepared. For months, he’d known that the venal king and his lackeys were trying to find a way to overturn the power of the Templars. That morning, they had finally summoned up the courage and the excuse. They had also found the stomach for a fight, and, although the knights didn’t surrender easily, the king’s men had surprise and numbers on their side and it wasn’t long before the knights were overpowered.

  They had stood back helplessly and watched as the Temple was ransacked. All the grand master could do was hope that the king and his henchmen would fail to grasp the significance of the loot that they carried away, or be so consumed by greed for the gold and jewels they couldn’t find that they would fail to notice those seemingly worthless objects that were, in fact, of immeasurable value. Then silence had fallen until slowly and with surprising courtesy, de Molay and his fellow knights were herded into wagons to be carried to their fate.

  Now, as de Molay r
emembered that silence, he realized that this was what was different about today.

  It was quiet.

  Usually, the dungeon was a noisy place: chains clattering, racks and wheels creaking, braziers hissing, along with the endless screams of the torturers’ victims.

  Not today, though.

  Then the grand master heard a sound. Footsteps, approaching. At first, he thought it was Gaspard Chaix, the chief of the torturers, but that ogre’s footsteps were unlike these; his were heavy and menacing. It wasn’t anyone of his crew of shambling animals either. No, there were many men coming, moving quickly along the tunnel and then they were in the chamber where de Molay hung in chains. Through swollen, bloodshot eyes, he saw half a dozen brightly dressed men standing before him. And at their center, of all people, was the king himself.

  Slender and imposing, King Philip IV stood a full head taller than the group of fawning sycophants clustered around him. In spite of his parlous state, de Molay was as always struck by the outward appearance of the ruler of France. How could a man of such physical grace be so thoroughly evil? With youthful features belying his forty-six years, Philip the Fair was light skinned and had long blond hair. He looked the very picture of a nobleman, yet for almost a decade, driven by an insatiable greed for wealth and power matched only by his vulgar profligacy, he had wreaked calculated death and destruction, inflicting torment upon all those who stood in his way or even merely displeased him.

  The Knights Templar had done more than merely displease him.

  De Molay heard more footsteps coming along the tunnel. Hesitant, nervous steps heralded the arrival in the chamber of a slight figure dressed in a cowled gray robe. The man’s foot slipped and he stumbled awkwardly on the uneven floor. The cowl fell away and de Molay recognized the pope. It was a long time since he had seen Clement, and, in the intervening period, the man’s face had altered. Deeply etched lines turned down the corners of his mouth as if he suffered some continual internal discomfort, while his eyes had sunk deep into dark hollows.