Red Templar

“Far more meaningful than that,” said the monk. “Imagine your Ku Klux Klan with the power of both the state and Church behind it. There are two hundred and twenty-eight million members of the Orthodox Church around the world, the large majority of them Russian-one hundred and twenty-five million, to be precise. It is a number to be reckoned with, Colonel Holliday, especially when it is effectively under the control of the Sirin, the upper-echelon members of the Phoenix order.”

“How many?” Holliday asked, startled.

“Two hundred and twenty-eight million, of which three-quarters of a million are American.”

“That’s a little hard to believe,” said Holliday, his tone skeptical. “But even if it’s true, it still doesn’t explain why Harriman and Walker were there, especially with a monster like Beria.”

“No, it doesn’t.”

Holliday thought for a moment. “Was Beria one of these Sirin?”

“Almost certainly.” The monk nodded. “In fact, it hardly could have been otherwise. Beria joined the NKVD, or Cheka, as it was known then in 1921. The NKVD in its various incarnations virtually ran the order dating all the way back to the 1917 revolution. Perhaps even before.”

“Before?”

“Before the NKVD there was the Okhrana, the czar’s secret police, and secretly members of the order as well.”

“It still doesn’t make any sense. Why would they have been interested in the sword?”

Throughout Holliday’s conversation with the monk, Eddie Cabrera had been keeping up a whispered running translation for Genrikhovich. At the mention of the sword, a word he clearly recognized in English, the Hermitage curator began a frenzied stream of Russian. The man was clearly extremely upset. Finally he stopped and turned to Holliday, his eyes wide and his expression one that Holliday could only conclude was abject fear.

“What’s he so frightened about?” Holliday asked.

“Yay-eech-a!” Genrikhovich blurted.

“The eggs,” translated Eddie. “Something about eggs.”

“What eggs?”

“Faberge!” Genrikhovich said, obviously agitated. “Yay-eech-a Faberge!”

Holliday’s brow wrinkled. The priceless Faberge eggs given to the wife of the czar each Easter. What connection could they possibly have to a compromising photograph taken during the Yalta Conference in 1945, where Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin agreed to cut up Europe like a birthday cake, and a Templar sword lost to history in the first years of the fourteenth century?

5

Holliday held up a hand. “Okay, let’s stop this right now. Back it up a little.” He looked at Genrikhovich hard, then turned to his friend Eddie. “Ask him how he knew about Rodrigues, and how he knew we were going to be at the Khartoum airport when we were.”

Eddie spun out a long, lilting line of Russian. Watching Eddie speak like a native was almost as strange as being in Dublin and hearing a waiter in a Chinese restaurant take your order in an Irish accent. Coming from a relentlessly upstate New York, blue-collar, Presbyterian background, Holliday was always astounded at people who could speak fluently in two languages, or in Eddie’s case three: Spanish, English and Russian.

Genrikhovich’s response was equally complicated and accompanied by various incomprehensible hand gestures. Dimitrov’s name was mentioned several times. In the end it was a waste of time.

“I can answer for myself, Colonel Holliday,” said the monk.

“Please do.”

“Do you know the name Theodore Svetoslav?”

Holliday dug into his memory banks. The file drawer for Bulgarian history had very little in it, but it was just enough. “Wasn’t he an emperor?”

“He was, between 1300 and 1313. I’m named after him, in fact, Theodore Svetoslav Dimitrov. My family traces back to his on both sides.”

“I’m sure that’s very impressive, but right now I’m not. What’s the connection?”

“As well as being emperor, Theodore Svetoslav was also a friend to the Templars and they to him. At that time much of the old Pilgrim Road from the Holy Land ran through the emperor’s territory. They fought with him in the Battle of Skafida in 1304, less than a hundred miles from here. A Templar saved the emperor’s life at the bridge at the Battle of Skafida. A special Templar.”

“Don’t tell me-the Templar in your crypt.”

“Mikail Alexandreivich Nevsky.” The monk nodded. “From the bloodline of Mikhail Yaroslavich, also known as Michael of Tver or Michael the Saint.”

“I’m not following,” said Holliday.

“My grandfather was a member of the White Templars, as was his father before him and his father before him. As am I.” There was a long moment of silence. Holliday knew what was required of him-it had been one of the first things he’d learned from the notebook Rodrigues had given to him as he lay dying in that volcanic crater in the Azores.

“What do you seek?” Holliday asked.

“I seek what was lost,” answered Dimitrov.

“And who lost it?”

“The king lost it.”

“And where is the king?”

“Burning in hell,” said Dimitrov with a smile. Holliday relaxed slightly. The exchange was almost a thousand years old, devised after the fall of the Templars so they could safely identify one another. The first time Holliday had used it was with Pierre Ducos, the fat little spider of a man who seemed to be at the center of the whole Templar web, living out his years in the little hilltop village of Domme in France.

“I never met Brother Rodrigues, but we corresponded. I was terribly saddened by his death. He was a good man.”

“That he was,” said Holliday, remembering the tall, dark man with the deep-set eyes.

“It was the first time I heard your name,” said Dimitrov.

“From whom?” Holliday asked.

“Pierre Ducos,” replied the monk.

“And he was the one who told you I was in Khartoum?”

“Yes. After Gospodin Doktor Genrikhovich contacted me with his story. I thought I should inform you. I asked him where I might find you and he told me.”

“And what is Gospodin Doktor Genrikhovich’s story?”

“In a nutshell, Gospodin Genrikhovich says that the Faberge eggs in the Kremlin Armoury collection are fakes. He also says that one of the eggs is the lost secret of secrets that allowed the Sirin to invisibly rule Russia for hundreds of years. According to Genrikhovich, if the secret were revealed it could destroy the world.” Dimitrov paused and glanced at the Russian. He turned back to Holliday.

Holliday gave Genrikhovich a long, skeptical look. “And what secret is that?”

Genrikhovich began to babble wildly, throwing his arms around. He looked as though he were having an apoplectic fit, his eyes bugging out, sweat beading on his face and his entire body shaking.

“He does not want me to tell you, not yet, but I feel I must. The key will reveal, among other terrible things, the final location of the Apophasis Megale, the Great Declaration of Simon Magus. The declaration supposedly proves beyond any doubt that Jesus Christ was a mortal man who lived and died as all of us do. And according to Genrikhovich, there is even more that he does not know about.”

Holliday took a breath. Simon Magus was the court magician of Emperor Nero, who could, with only the power of his mind, levitate and move objects at will. Simon Magus, the man who virtually single-handedly invented the gnostic creed. Simon Magus, the man the Catholic Church called the King of Heretics and perhaps the devil