The Rosetta Key

“And you’re going to tell me they tried their best and didn’t find them.”

“On the contrary, I am going to tell you they possibly found exactly what you are looking for. Or, that if they didn’t, it’s unlikely you could succeed either. They searched for years. Jericho tells me you have days, at most.”

What did this mutilated man know? “Found what, exactly?”

“Curiously, scholars still argue about that. A group of Christian knights came away from Jerusalem with inexplicable powers, and yet they proved powerless when they were betrayed. So did they find something? Or not?”

“A fairy story,” Jericho scoffed.

“But one grounded in history, brother,” Miriam said quietly.

“Those stories of tunnels are musty legends,” Jericho insisted to Miriam.

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“And what is legend but an echo of truth?” his sister answered.

I looked among the three of them. They’d argued this before.

“What legends?”

“Of our ancestors, the Knights Templar,” Miriam said. “Their full name was the Poor Knights of Christ on the Temple of Solomon.

Not all the warrior monks were celibate, and tradition holds that our blood descends from theirs. They sought what you seek, and some think they found it.”

“Do they now?”

“It’s a curious story,” Farhi said. “I understand you have lived in Paris, Mr. Gage? Are you familiar with the Champagne region of France, southeast of Paris and north of Troyes?”

“I’ve passed through, and enjoyed its products.”

“More than thirteen hundred years ago, one of the most terrible battles in all history was fought there. The last of the Romans defeated Attila, the great Hun.”

“The Battle of Chalons,” I said, grateful that Franklin had mentioned this ancient scrape once or twice. He was a fount of oddball information, and read history books thick enough for three doorstops, written by some Englishman named Gibbon.

“At this battle Attila had a mysterious ancient sword with mystical powers, dating far, far back in time. Legends of such enchantments, and the idea that there are greater powers in this world than mere muscle and steel, carried down to the generations of Franks who came to inhabit Champagne. These were people who thought there might be more to the world than what we easily see and touch. The great saint and teacher Saint Bernard of Clairvaux was one who heard these stories.”

That name struck a bell too. I remembered the French savant Jomard evoking him when we first climbed the Great Pyramid.

“Wait, I’ve heard of him. He said something about God being height and breadth—being dimensions. That you could incorporate divine dimensions into holy buildings.”

“Yes. ‘What is God? He is length, width, height and depth,’ the saint said. And the powerful knight Andre de Montbard, Bernard’s 6 6

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uncle, shared the idea that ancients who knew such things might have buried powerful secrets in the East. Buried, perhaps, beneath Solomon’s Temple, which occupied the Temple Mount a short distance from where we sit.”

“Freemasons believe that to this day,” I said, remembering my dead journalist friend, Antoine Talma, and his enthusiastic theories.

“In 1119,” Farhi went on, “Bernard’s uncle, Montbard, was one of nine knights who journeyed to the Holy Land on a special mission.

Jerusalem had already been captured by the Crusaders, and these nine arrived in the city and asked to form a new military order of warrior-monks called the Templars. Yet from the very beginning their purpose seemed mysterious. They proposed to protect Christian pilgrims, but these men from Champagne initially recruited no followers and did little patrolling of the Jaffa road. Instead, they got extraordinary permission from the ruler of Jerusalem, King Baldwin II, to set up their headquarters in the El-Aqsa Mosque, on the southern end of the Temple Mount.”

“Nine newcomers get to camp on the Temple Mount?” Farhi nodded, fixing me with his one good eye. “Curious, isn’t it?”

“And what do these Templars have to do with Moses and the ark?” I asked.

“Here we come to speculation,” Farhi said. “The rumors are that they tunneled into the roots of what had been Solomon’s Temple and found . . . something. After their sojourn here, they returned to Europe, were given special status by the pope, and became the continent’s first bankers and most powerful military order. Recruits flocked to them.

They were rich beyond imagination, and kings trembled before the Templar Order. And then on one, single, terrible night—on Friday, October 13, 1309—the Templar leaders were arrested in a massive purge by the king of France. Hundreds were tortured and burned.

With them died the secrets of what they’d found in Jerusalem. So legends began: how did an obscure order of knights grow so rich and powerful so quickly?”