controlling the cats of Paris. We need the wisdom of Solomon.”
“Do you now?” We were sharing supper in the confines of my cell.
Boniface had done the same with Smith because the jailer was bored and had no friends. I suppose his company was supposed to be part of our torture, but I’d taken an odd liking to him. He showed more tolerance of his prisoners than some hosts show guests, and paid better attention. It didn’t hurt that Astiza remained quite fine to look at and that I, of course, was uncommonly good company.
Now he nodded. “Bonaparte wants to be a George Washington, reluctantly accepting stewardship of his country, but he hasn’t the gravity and reserve. Yes, I’ve studied Washington, and his stoic mod-esty is a credit to your young nation. The Corsican arrived thinking he might be swept into the Directory by popular acclaim, but his superiors received him with coldness. What is he doing back from Egypt without orders? Have you two seen
“If you will recall, Monsieur Boniface, we are confined to this tower,” Astiza said gently.
“Yes, yes, of course. Oh, that brave periodical denounced the Egyptian campaign! Made a mockery of it! An army abandoned! Soldiers thrown uselessly at the ramparts of Acre! Bonaparte humiliated by the man once imprisoned here, Sir Sidney Smith! The newspapers are a voice for the assembly, you know. It’s all over for Napoleon.” Talma had told me that Bonaparte feared hostile newspapers more than bayonets. But what no one knew was that Napoleon had the book, and that Silano once again had the full code to read it. So much for bargaining with Josephine, the scheming slut. That woman could seduce the pope, and reduce him to beggary in the process.
When I asked Boniface about the Knight Templars who’d built this place, it was like turning the handle on a pump. Facts and theo-t h e
r o s e t t a k e y
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ries gushed out. “Jacques de Molay himself was grand master here and then tortured! There are ghosts here, young people, ghosts I’ve heard shrieking in winter storms. The Templars were burned and beaten until they admitted to the worst kinds of abominations and devil worship, and then they were sent to the stake. Yet where was their treasure? The rooms you’re confined in were supposed to be stuffed, yet when the French king arrived to pillage them, they were empty. And where was the rumored source of Templar power? De Molay would say nothing, except when he went to the stake. Then he prophesized king and pope would be dead within the year. Oh, the shiver in the crowd when he prophesized that! And it was true!
These Templars were not just warrior-monks, my friend, they were magicians. They’d found something in Jerusalem that gave them strange powers.”
“Imagine if such power could be rediscovered,” Astiza murmured.
“A man like Bonaparte would seize the state in an instant. Then we’ll see things change, let me tell you, for better
“Is that when our trial will be?”
“No. That’s when you’ll be guillotined.” He gave a Gallic shrug.
Our jailer was eager to hear our adventures, which we cautiously edited. Had we been inside the Great Pyramid? Oh yes. Nothing to see.
And Jerusalem’s Temple Mount?
A Muslim holy site now, with Christian access prohibited.
What about rumors of lost cities in the desert?
If they are lost, how could we find them?
The ancients could not raise their great monuments without colossal secrets, Boniface insisted. Magic had been lost with the priests of yore. Ours was a pale modern age, stripped of wonder, mechanical and cynical. Science was subduing mystery, and rationalism was trampling wonder. Nothing like Egypt!
“Yet what if it were found again?” I hinted.
“You know something, don’t you, American? No, don’t shake your head! You know something, and I, Boniface, am going to get it out of you!”
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w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h
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On October 26, our jailer brought electrifying news. Lucien Bonaparte, age twenty-four, had just been elected president of the Council of Five Hundred!
I knew Lucien had been working on his brother’s behalf in Paris long before Napoleon left Egypt. He was a gifted politician. But president of France’s most powerful chamber? “I thought you had to be thirty years old to hold that post?”
“That’s why Paris is buzzing! He lied of course—had to, in order to comply with the Constitution—but everyone knows the lie. Yet they elected him anyway! This is Napoleon’s doing, somehow. The deputies are frightened, or bewitched.”
More intriguing news followed. Napoleon Bonaparte, who’d been snubbed by the Directory, now was to have a banquet in his honor.
Was public opinion turning? Had the general been wooing the city’s politicians to his side?
On November 9, 1799—18 Brumaire on the new revolutionary calendar—Boniface came to us goggle-eyed. The man was a walking newspaper. “I don’t believe it!” he exclaimed. “It’s as if our legislators are under the spell of Mesmer! At half past four this morning, the Council of Ancients was roused out of bed and sleepily assembled in the
