Valley of the Templars

JOHN LEESON

SENIOR STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

He made another set identifying Eddie as his assistant and printed those out, as well. Considering the fact that Havana was a Unesco World Heritage city, it made sense that they would send a photographer assistant around every few years to document and project on the restoration of historic buildings in the city, and all the camera equipment in the suitcase would easily disguise the added eleven pounds of weight.

“That’s about it,” Holliday said. “Tomorrow we buy some clothes and a few guidebooks in the morning, have our meeting down the street in the afternoon and the next day we fly to Cuba.”

“And pray that everything goes as we have planned when we get there,” added Eddie.

Dr. Steven Braintree’s office at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Medieval Studies was located on the third floor of a large, stodgy-looking neo-Georgian building kitty-corner to the hotel on the southern side of Bloor Street. The office was pretty much the way Holliday had remembered: piles of papers on piles of file folders on piles of books with a few overflowing filing cabinets and more files, papers and books piled on his wide windowsill. Braintree hadn’t changed much, either; there were a few flecks of gray in his long dark hair now, but the trendy Prada glasses, the sneakers and the jeans were just the same. This time the message on his black T-shirt said FREE GIGI’S! PIZZA GIGI’S, BEST PIZZA IN TORONTO—PICKY POTHEADS PICK PIZZA GIGI’S.

Holliday made the introductions and they sat down in what little space was left. “Been a while, Colonel. I was a little surprised to hear from you,” said Braintree. Holliday had been following clues to the origins of the Templar sword he’d found hidden in his uncle Henry’s house, and Braintree had been on the list. “You ever find what you were looking for?” asked the history professor.

“Too much, when you get right down to it,” Holliday replied. It had never occurred to him that there would be a litter of bodies left behind him on his search or that the monk Helder Rodrigues would pass along the best-kept secret in seven hundred years before dying in his arms.

“So, what can I do for you now?” Braintree asked.

“Tell me everything you know about the Templars in Cuba.”

Braintree glanced at Eddie. “Te Cubana?”

“Si, Doctore.” Eddie nodded.

“Miami?”

“Alamar,” responded the Cuban with a smile. Braintree laughed.

“Un cubano real, entonces,” said Braintree.

“Si,” said Eddie.

According to Braintree, after the dissolution of the Templar order by Pope Clement in 1312, its remnants fled in all directions, some across the English Channel into England and Scotland, some—as Holliday well knew—to the Azores and some to Portugal and Spain. The ones who crossed the Pyrenees Mountains into the Catalonian Province of Spain enjoyed a brief life as the Christ Knights of Catalonia, but they were quickly rooted out by the Catholic king of Spain. Those who traveled by sea and landed in Portugal fared much better and came under the protection of King Diniz under the name the Order of Christ in 1319, which led directly to Emmanuel I and Christopher Columbus.

“That you’ll have to explain,” said Holliday.

Braintree did. Although virtually every school history text in North America identified Columbus as an Italian from Genoa, there was virtually no real evidence of this at all. It was far more likely that he was born in either Spain or, even likelier, Portugal.

By 1492, the year Columbus sailed west to what he thought was the Indies, both Columbus and Emmanuel I were members of the Ordem Militar de Cristo, or the Military Order of Christ, the present incarnation of the Knights Templar in Portugal at the time. Although Columbus soughts funds from Isabella of Spain for his voyage of discovery, he already had a secret pact with Emmanuel that any information about his voyage that he gave to Spain should also be given to Portugal. Columbus agreed and the Templar cross on the sails of his famous ships, the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria, were a signal to Emmanuel that their secret bond would be kept.

Columbus spent very little time on the island of Cuba before moving on to Hispaniola, or what is now known as Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. One of the crew members on the first voyage, a man in his midtwenties and of prominent birth, Diego Velazquez, caught Columbus’s eye and soon after they settled in Hispaniola, Columbus ritually made Velazquez an officer in the Ordem Militar de Cristo, an honor the young Spaniard took very seriously. Nineteen years later in 1511, Velazquez, now known as Don Diego Velazquez de Cuellar, was ordered by Diego Columbus, Christopher Columbus’s firstborn child and now viceroy of the West Indies, to occupy and conquer the island of Cuba. For the next five years Don Diego Velazquez established a number of settlements, including, most notably, Santiago de Cuba and San Cristobal de Havana, a small town just west of present-day Havana. For these efforts Don Diego Velazquez was made governor of Cuba by Diego Columbus. To commemorate the discovery of Havana, Don Diego built La Templete, a small neoclassical temple, which would soon become the headquarters for Don Diego’s version of the Ordem Militar de Cristo, which he named the Brotherhood of the Knights of Christ, La Hermandad dos Cavaleiros de Cristo. Very soon after this, at least between its members it became known simply as La Hermandad or the Brotherhood.

“Does it still exist?” Holliday asked.

Braintree shrugged. “There’ve been all sorts of rumors over the years, just like the never-ending rumors of the original Templar, but soon after conquering Cuba, Velazquez fell out of favor with Diego Columbus during Cortez’s conquest of Mexixo, and stripped of authority, he died in Santiago de Cuba in 1524. Most probably the Brotherhood died with him.”

“Or maybe not,” said Eddie quietly.

4

The Air Canada A320 came in low over the sea, reaching land in the early afternoon. The gently rolling countryside below could just as easily have been rural France—fields, farms and small villages crouched in broad valleys or perched on low hills, all connected by country roads that led to broader highways.

“Mi patria precioso,” whispered Eddie with a choke in his voice as he stared down at the landscape from the window seat of the narrow-body jet.

“Let’s just hope we get out of the airport,” said Holliday.

“We will, mi colonel, but remember, after that you must listen very carefully to what I tell you about how things work in this place.”

“I promise to obey every command.” Holliday smiled. Eddie raised an expressive eyebrow. An instant later the slightly ominous whir and thump of the flaps lowering filled the interior of the aircraft and they began their final approach to Jose Marti International Airport.

Terminal 3 at Jose Marti was built specifically for international arrivals and departures, showcasing Cuba as a modern twenty-first-century country, which everybody, especially the Cubans, knows it is not. The architecture was slick: glass, steel and open-beam high ceilings with crisscrossing assemblies of pipe and I-beams, some of them hung with large versions of the world’s flags, including the Stars and Stripes. The Cuban government might hate American foreign policy and politicians, but they love American tourists. Although there have been no sanctioned flights to Cuba since 1960, the Cubans found ways around the problem almost immediately. Americans could reach Cuba by first going to Canada, Mexico or the Bahamas and flying onward from those countries. Instead of passport entry and exit stamps, Cuban customs provided the tourist with a small separate visa slipped into the passport on arrival and removed on departure. Although each tourist who visited Cuba from the United States could technically