The Templar's Code

Moments after that, he caught the westbound subway. An elaborate hoax to make the pretty boy bastard think he was leaving town.

God, he hoped the ruse worked.

Feeling a trickle of sweat roll down the side of his face, he wiped his shirt sleeve across his brow, the humid air inside the cavernous station jungle-like.

Finally reaching the turnstile, he snatched his subway ticket out of the metal slot and rushed toward the escalator. Head bent, he sprinted up the left side. Glancing upward, he groaned, the escalator at least a city block long. Ten years had come and gone since he rowed crew at Brown University, his lung capacity not what it used to be.

A few moments later, wheezing like an old fart with emphysema, he stepped off the escalator. He glanced around the urban neighborhood, disoriented. Dupont Circle was a hip hodgepodge of cafes, bookstores, and high- end art galleries. The nearby traffic circle, with at least six streets radiating out in all directions, didn’t help.

He stopped a middle-aged suit rushing past. “Excuse me,” he huffed, still working on catching his breath. “I’m looking for the House of the Temple.”

The suit pointed to one of the radiating streets. “Two blocks up New Hampshire. Turn right on S Street,” he brusquely replied, clearly annoyed that the last five seconds of his life had been stolen from him.

Lovett nodded his thanks. Ignoring the traffic signal, he darted in front of a yellow cab. His jaywalking incited several motorists to lay on the horn.

Up yours! I’m in a hurry.

Figuring he’d catch his breath at the other end of the line, he jogged down New Hampshire Avenue, the tree- lined street relatively free of pedestrian traffic. The embassies of Zimbabwe, Namibia, and Nicaragua passed in a blur.

He peered over his shoulder.

Damn. There was a dark-haired man about a block back. He didn’t think it was the pretty boy bastard. But then again, it might be.

Catching sight of an English basement on a nearby town house, he veered off course, ducking into the brick stairwell. He scrunched out of sight, wedging himself between a metal garbage can and a blue recycling bin. Worried he might puke, or even pass out, he ripped open the Velcro flap on his cargo pants and removed a prescription bottle. The doctor at the walk-in clinic prescribed the Xanax to help manage his anxiety. He’d taken one an hour ago and so far it hadn’t done jack.

Fumbling with the childproof lid, he popped another tablet into his mouth.

A second later, his courage in freefall, he peered over the brick retaining wall. The dark-haired man was now a half block away. Still too far to make out his features.

Lovett shoved his hand back into his pocket, this time removing a small digital voice recorder. He’d been keeping a verbal diary. Just in case.

Fearing the worst, he switched it on. Then, in a lowered voice, he continued. “If someone is listening to this, shit, it means the fucker finally caught up to me. Just so we’re clear, I’m not paranoid. I am being stalked. But there’s too much at stake to tuck tail and run. No way in hell I’m going to let that pretty boy bastard take what’s mine. If he wants the treasure, he’s going to have to—”

The dark-haired man strolled past.

Lovett sagged against the brick wall, relieved.

Hoping the Xanax kicked in sooner rather than later, he shoved the recorder back in his pocket and climbed out of the stairwell.

At S Street, he turned right. About a hundred yards down, he caught sight of the House of the Temple, a colossus of stone that took up an entire city block.

Christ.

What kind of drugs were the Freemasons taking when they constructed the ungodly structure?

The House of the Temple looked like an ancient Greek sanctuary with a truncated pyramid plunked on the top of it. The pyramid bore an uncanny resemblance to the one on the back of the dollar bill. Which no doubt gave conspiracy theorists a hard-on. Add to that the giant pair of sphinxes that flanked the imposing granite steps and the whole thing put him in mind of the Temple of Mausolus at Halicarnassus. Which was kind of ironic, since he spent a summer at Bodrum working on an archaeology dig. Slaving away, actually, grad students forced to do all the grunt work. But then he dug up a gold earring. Talk about an adrenaline rush. It sure beat the hell out of sifting through potsherds.

Deciding there and then that the real glory was in treasure hunting, he spent the next summer at Key West, volunteering with the Fisher expedition. Man alive. It was an adrenaline rush on steroids, gold and silver bars strewn across the ocean floor, there for the picking. But not the taking, the Fisher folks being a real proprietary lot. Possessed of a first-class education and a burning desire to make his mark on the world, he figured he could find his own treasure trove.

And he was damned closed to doing just that.

But he needed help.

That’s why he was standing in front of the butt-ugly building.

Knowing he only had a few minutes before the clock struck one, Lovett took the steps two at a time, counting thirty-three of them. At the top, he opened a massive pair of bronze doors. About to step inside, he glanced over his shoulder.

The pretty boy bastard was nowhere in sight.

Mission accomplished.

CHAPTER 2

“… leaving no question in my mind that the Ark of the Covenant was a form of ancient technology inherited from the Egyptians,” Caedmon Aisquith told his audience, more than a few of whom had a copy of his book Isis Revealed in plain sight.

“Next question?” He pointed to a woman sitting in the front row of the library reading room. At least four dozen jurists’ chairs had been placed in the middle of the room, turning the book-lined chamber into a makeshift lecture hall.

The bespectacled attendee glanced from side to side, verifying that she was indeed the chosen questioner. “Yes, I’m, um, curious about your recent trip to Ethiopia, which you briefly mentioned in the lecture. How do you know the Ark of the Covenant isn’t hidden there?”

Discreetly glancing at his wristwatch, Caedmon saw that there was nearly five minutes left in the Q&A session. Ample time to flesh out the answer. Stepping over to the nearby table, he scanned the thumbnail picture gallery on his laptop. Image selected, he accessed the PowerPoint display, projecting a map of Ethiopia onto the screen behind him.

“For those of you unfamiliar with the tale, Menelik, the illegitimate son of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, supposedly stole the Ark of the Covenant from his father’s fabled temple in Jerusalem and took it to Ethiopia in the mid-tenth century B.C., where it’s reputedly still hidden, safeguarded by the priests at St. Mary of Zion located in Axum.” Using a laser pointer, Caedmon indicated an area in the northeastern quadrant of Ethiopia, Axum, located one hundred kilometers from the Red Sea.

“Keen to explore the theory, my research assistant and I traveled to Ethiopia this past January.” He gestured to a woman with long, curly brown hair standing on the sidelines, leaning against a bookcase. Attired in an ankle- length denim dress with a crimson red shawl tied not around her shoulders but around her hips, she was the lone peacock in the drab-feathered flock. “At this juncture, allow me to introduce my traveling companion, photographer Edie Miller.”

As if on cue, every head in the group swiveled to the left.

Edie Miller acknowledged the collective stare with an amused half smile.

Introduction made, he next pulled up a stunning photograph of St. Mary’s taken at sunset, the stone building bathed in a tangerine glow.