But nothing had.
The Falcon Temple—and its precious cargo—had simply vanished.
The king turned and took one final look at the broken man. 'End it,' he ordered.
The torturer shuffled closer. 'When, Your Majesty?'
'Tomorrow morning,' the king said, the prospect perversely brightening his spirits.
Hearing the words, de Molay felt something spread over him that he didn't recognize at first. It was a feeling he hadn't experienced in many years.
Relief.
Through hooded eyes, he glanced toward the pope and saw his stifled delight.
'What about their possessions?' the pope asked, his voice quavering. By now, de Molay knew, all that would remain was anything that couldn't be sold to help pay off the king's debts. 'The books, papers, artifacts. They belong to the Church.'
'Then take them.' The king waved a dismissive hand before casting one last seething glance at de Molay and storming out of the chamber, his entourage trailing hurriedly after him.
For the briefest of instants, the eyes of the pope and de Molay met before Clement could turn and rush from the chamber. In that brief space of time, de Molay had read the pope's mind, confirming the small man for what he was: a scheming opportunist who had manipulated the greedy king for his own ends. For the Church's ends.
A scheming manipulator who had bested him.
But de Molay couldn't give him the satisfaction of believing it. He seized the opportunity and rallied himself, summoning all of his strength and channeling it into a glare of confident defiance that he beamed at his nemesis. For a fleeting second, a look of fear crossed the pope's weathered features before he composed his face into a stern gaze and lifted up his cowl.
The grand master's cracked lips curled into what would have once been a smile. He knew he'd succeeded in sowing doubt in the small man's mind.
A victory of sorts.
The pope wouldn't sleep well tonight.
You may have won this battle, de Molay thought. But our war is far from over. And with that thought, he closed his eyes and awaited his approaching death.
Chapter 21
Reilly did his best to avoid appearing conflicted. Much as he was enjoying sitting there with Tess, he couldn't see the relevance of everything she'd just told him. A bunch of selfless knights grow into a medieval superpower only to get their wings clipped and disappear igno-miniously into the annals of history. What did that have to do with a gang of armed robbers trashing a museum seven hundred years later?
'You think the guys at the museum were wearing Templar outfits?' he asked.
'Yes. The Templars wore simple clothing, very different from the gaudy outfits other knights wore back then. Remember, they were religious monks, committed to poverty. The white robes symbolized the purity of life that was expected of them, and the red crosses, the color of blood, advertised their special relationship with the Church.'
'Okay, but if you asked me to draw a knight, I'd probably come up with something that looks pretty close to that without consciously thinking about the Templars. It's a pretty iconic look, isn't it?'
Tess nodded. 'Look, on its own, I agree, it's not conclusive. But then there's the encoder.'
'This is the object the fourth horseman took. The one you were next to.'
Tess moved in a bit closer, seeming more driven now. 'Yes. I looked it up. It's far more advanced than anything that appeared for hundreds of years. I mean this thing is revolutionary. And the Templars were known to be masters of encryption. Codes were the backbone of their whole banking system. When the pilgrims traveling to the Holy Land deposited money with them, the receipts they were given were written in code, which could only be deciphered by Templars. That way, no one could forge a deposit note and cheat them. They were pioneers in this field and somehow, this encoder fits their sophisticated, secretive methods.'
'But why would a Templar encoder be part of the Vatican's treasures?'
'Because the Vatican and the king of France both conspired to bring down the Order. They were both after its wealth. It's easy to imagine that whatever the Templars had in their preceptories ended up either at the Louvre or in the Vatican.'
Reilly looked uncertain. 'You mentioned something about a Latin saying?'
Tess visibly rallied herself. 'That's what got me started. The fourth horseman, the one who took the encoder. When he had it in his hands, it was like this big religious moment for him. Like he was in a trance. And as he held it, he said something in Latin. I think he said 'Veritas vos liberabit?'
She waited to see if Reilly knew what it meant. His quizzical look indicated he didn't. 'It means 'the truth will set you free.' I looked into it, and, although it's a very widely used saying, it also happens to be a marking on a Templar castle in the south of France.'
Tess could see that he was pondering what she'd just told him, but wasn't sure how to read him. She fidgeted with her cup, downing the last of her coffee, which had by now gone cold, then decided to keep going.
'I know it probably doesn't sound like much, but that's only until you start to understand the level of interest that the Templars inspire in people. Their origins, their activities and beliefs, and their violent demise are all shrouded in mystery. They have a huge following. You wouldn't believe the amount of books and material I found about them, and I've only scratched the surface. It's just phenomenal. And here's the thing. What usually triggers off the conjecture is that their fabulous wealth was never recovered.'
'I thought that was why the king of France rounded them up,' Reilly observed.
'It's what he was after. But he never found it. No one ever did. No gold, no jewels. Nothing.
And yet the Templars were known to have a phenomenal treasure trove. One historian claims the Templars discovered one hundred forty-eight tons of gold and silver in and around Jerusalem when they first got there, even before the donations from across Europe started pouring in.'
'And no one knows what happened to it?'
'There are widely accepted claims that the night before die Templars were all arrested, twenty-four knights rode out of die Paris preceptory with several wagonloads of crates and escaped to the Adantic port of La Rochelle. They're supposed to have sailed away on board eighteen galleys, never to be seen again.'
Reilly pondered the information. 'So you're saying the museum's raiders were really after the encoder, in order to use it to somehow help them find the Templars' treasure?'
'Maybe. The question is, what was that treasure? Was it gold coins and jewelry, or something else, something more esoteric, something that,' she hesitated, 'requires a slightly bigger leap of faith.'
She waited to see how that sat with him.
Reilly flashed her a comforting grin. 'I'm still here, aren't I?'
She leaned forward and lowered her voice unconsciously. 'A lot of these theories claim that the Templars were part of an age-old conspiracy to discover and guard some arcane knowledge. It could be a lot of things. They were said to be the custodians of many holy relics—there's a French historian who even tiiinks they had the embalmed head of Jesus—but one theory I kept coming across and that seemed to hold more water than the others was that it has to do with the Holy Grail
—which as you probably know isn't necessarily an actual cup or some kind of physical 'chalice' that Jesus supposedly drank from at the Last Supper, but could well be a metaphorical reference to a secret concerning the real events surrounding His death and the survival of His bloodline into medieval times.'
'Jesus's bloodline?'
'Heretical as it may seem, this line of thought—and it's a very popular one, believe me—claims Jesus and Mary Magdalene had a child— maybe, probably more than one—that was raised in secret and hidden from the Romans, and that Jesus's bloodline has been a closely guarded secret for the last two thousand years, with all kinds of shadowy societies protecting His descendants and passing on their secret to a select group of 'illuminati.' Da Vinci, Isaac Newton, Victor Hugo, pretty much any illustrious name over the centuries—they're all supposed to have been part of this secret cabal of the holy bloodline's protectors.' Tess paused and watched for Reilly's reaction. 'I
